That was some very impressive connection making...
After Trump won in 2016, I was astounded by the liberal descent into mass delusion. When Covid hit, and many a liberal started talking about punishing the unvaccinated, dehumanizing them, cheering authoritarianism, I was appalled. When Liberals cheered the weaponization of race and gender, cancel culture and character assassination, I knew war had started. When Russia started amassing at Ukraine's border, so very exactly timed when Covid receded, I knew something deeply nefarious was afoot, confirmed when I saw Liberals wailing and gnashing their teeth, their bloodlust hardly concealed. Now the leaked Roe v Wade decision, at the same time they are apoplectic about misinformation and the scourge that is Musk buying Twitter, while Biden institutes a Ministry of Truth to their cheers....
America is the one place to mount a defense against globalist authoritarians. Hence the psyops perpetrated against us here more than anywhere. It is not cultural succession as much the deliberate forced disintegration of Nation State America.
I've known some of them for a long time, and a surprising thing is that everyone who supported Bush and the invasion of Iraq, the people who defended Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, now support forced vaccinations and grooming. They are not especially liberal or conservative, they are just a media-directed mob of sociopaths that adopt whatever costume they are told to at the time.
It's one thing when an abusive cult run by a megalomaniacal dark triad sociopath nucleates inside an otherwise relatively healthy society. It's another thing entirely when society as a whole becomes an abusive cult.
Great piece by the way. It didn't surprise me in the slightest that Jones availed himself if sexual access to the women under his sway, that's cult leader 101. It was eyebrow-raising to find out that he engaged in systematic buck-breaking. Now, with that in mind ... what to make of the lionization of homosexuality?
About 3% of the population has always been gay, and Walt Whitman was out cheerfully celebrating virile workmen's democracy behind a long series of barns in the 19th century. But suddenly: "Gen Z adults who identify as LGBTQ has increased from 10.5% in 2017 to 20.8% in 2021."
My impression, from talking to Gen Zers, is that a lot of that 20% are identifying with the B in LGBT. It's an easy way to join the rainbow people and therefore accrue victim cred as one of the Maoist red classes - especially compelling for white kids who otherwise go on the evil list. Saying you're bisexual requires zero commitment - you don't even have to so much as hold hands with someone of the same sex.
That said it says a lot that literally the only identifiable youth subculture is that of the be-pronouned.
Everyone is bisexual, but not the way LGBTQ advocates think. The true sexual relationship between humans is in the quantum domain that Reality is a projection of. It is known that particles can become entangled when they are produced by an event. The same type of links happen when cells divide. Cells communicate with each other chemically, electrically and by quantum entanglement. DNA from men a woman had sex with have been found in their brains after they died. In light of this, the deep meaning of 'becomes one flesh' can be derived. The human biological unit is not man or woman but a couple that shares both parts.
Sorry, but, no. You've been misinformed regarding both Greece and Rome. In the former case, those found guilty of sodomy had their citizenship revoked. In the latter, Romans considered homosexual relations to be shameful in the extreme. As but one example, Julius Caesar spent his life trying to quash rumors that he'd engaged in a gay love affair with a Greek king in his youth. You don't do that in a culture in which bisexuality is the norm.
All of this seems to stem from mistranslations. The Greeks had multiple words for love, eg philia and eros. They would describe very close male friends as 'lovers', and when this was badly translated into English by lazy 19th century philologers they did so with the connotation of bum buddies. This then got picked up by activist classicists in the 20th century, who wanted to normalize homosexuality in the modern world by depicting antiquity as a big gay pile.
So far as Japan goes, my impression is that homosexuality was never looked on particularly kindly in that culture. Certainly not in modern times: Yukio Mishima had to hide it, for instance. And if it was frowned upon in the relatively liberal Japan of the 50s, I seriously doubt that the warrior honor culture of the Edo period or the Civil War era would have been more sexually open.
"Go read a book." Always amusing how leftists assume ignorance in their interlocutors. I've got a bookshelf packed with primary classical works and secondary sources, all of which I've read cover to cover. In none of them did I detect the slightest indication of a permissive attitude towards same sex relations.
Dover's nonsense was based on a few pornographic vases. Meanwhile, Socrates and Plato were both very clear that carnal relations between men were an abomination. There was furthermore no ambiguity on the subject in Greek law. Reasoning from smatterings of racy verse and the odd risque piece of pottery to infer general societal mores is lazy scholarship, particularly when the considerable evidence contradicting the hypothesis is simply ignored. Not that lazy scholarship is any barrier to politically motivated academics pushing a narrative that conveniently aligns ancient history with their modern social preferences, or to their shoddy work being uncritically repeated by their fellow travelers.
My gay ancient Greek professor was dismissive of Dover for some of the reasons you cite. What's interesting to me about the Phillip II of Macedon quote is that it suggests a widespread intolerance for homosexuality, not acceptance. "Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful." Of course, it's just one quote so one can't really make conclusions about where the majority was on this, but apparently Phillip II thought it was significant enough to weigh in.
I'm not bothered by homosexuality or gay marriage. But, getting the historical/anthropological evidence correct is important.
I appreciate the back and forth (absent the frustrated ad hominems) that you and Tano had.
Thank you for writing these two essays, Chris, and for the book recommendations.
Unfortunately, a lot of "well-meaning" parents ruin their children using these and similar techniques, though not necessarily to the extreme degree that Jim Jones used them. I'm one of four children born to a pair of emotionally (or psychologically) sick parents. I'd say our spirits were certainly damaged, if not actually broken, by the bad parenting we experienced.
I'm painfully aware of how sick our parents were and how badly I was treated. I can't speak for exactly how my siblings feel about the parenting they received, though I'm pretty sure they're in a tremendous amount of denial about how damaging it was. I see this in their hideous sycophancy to our demented, sick, sadistic, egotistical, arrogant, unbelievably narcissistic father.
Our mother died over twenty-two years ago. I hated and feared her all my life, and I've never once missed her. I was emotionally distant from my father all my life, and at this point I hate him with a burning passion. He is a monster. I seriously considered running away from home when I was a teenager. To this day I honestly think I'd have been better off had I done so.
Great piece. I guess what stands out to me is that the insanity of Peoples Temple can still be traced to one deranged, but charismatic, individual: Jones, who was methodical and deliberate in his approach. But when you look at what's happening today, it feels a lot more distributed - it feels harder (at least for me) to trace the rot to a single source, and therefore is more difficult to deal with.
Maybe there is no single source, but some combination of 1) post-modernism (and attending decline in faith), 2) the internet providing endless content and frictionless distribution, and 3) wealth inequality and an increasingly entrenched elite class? Just thinking out loud, welcome any thoughts.
Mattias Desmet, a professor of psychology in Ghent, has a lot to say about what he calls "mass formation," and others call "mass psychosis." His book, the Psychology of Totalitarianism, will be published soon (June 23, 2022.) In the meantime you can find speeches he's given in the past several months online.
I think there's a lot of conflation between the concepts of mass formation and mass psychosis. The latter is simply a collective madness; the Dutch tulip bubble could be an example. The former is predicated on mass psychosis, but also involves the crystallization of that psychotic state into a paranoid, malign, punitive, totalitarianism that hasn't simply gone mad, but also demands that everyone go mad.
While Desmet doesn't mention it as far as I know, his mass formation concept has considerable overlap with ponerology - the study of evil as applied to politics. In a ponerogenic process one also accounts for the influence of characteropathic individuals (narcissists, sociopaths, etc.) as well as schizoid personality types, who can act as the nucleating element around which a seriously bad mass formation can take place.
In the People's Temple example, Jones and his immediate helpers are the ponerogenic element; the followers are the mass formation.
Re ponerology, you see this in both parties today. I find both to be repulsive in their almost total lack of ability to solve problems. It's like they live only to oppose their counterparts, to such an extreme that you could argue that they constitute a single entity.
They, at least those in elective office, live only to raise money for their next election. Any thought, effort or activity outside of that is alien to them.
Please tell us that ponerology has a redemptive practical side? I am fascinated to hear of ponerology for the first time. Evil applied to politics must be a vast subject. Depending on how those two terms are framed, I imagine it might describe everyday 'banal' human events, or does it confine itself to the exceptional ones? Whether ponerology takes a broad or narrow focus, how can it inform healing of individuals and communities?
Your 3) gets closest to the root cause, but for my money the issue isn't an elite per se - there's always an elite - but rather the nature of that elite. The managerial class who currently serve as our elite have essentially all of the classic sociopathic personality traits at a collective level (manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness, etc.), which sets up perfect conditions for ponerogenesis. The paralogic of postmodernism is ultimately a symptom of their influence: look at any ponerized system in history and you'll find the same use of slippery word games and broken logic used to justify absurdity and atrocity.
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world.
Seth Barron review of
Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, by Daniel J. Flynn (ISI Books, 330 pp., $27.95)
It’s weird because my vaxxer friends would say I’m the cult member and been brainwashed but I think it’s them that are deluded. That’s the problem these days. We can’t point our fingers and go that place, that cult, that’s gotta go! because everyone is socially entangled. So perplexing but thank you for a wonderful, thought provoking piece. Well done!!
Same here...I have friends who will not let me in their house because their brain has melted and they cannot discern any difference between vax status and viral status..but Australians did get a hell of a lot of lockdowns, continuous case updates and a dash of rubber bullets..to help remove the spine and brain of most of us...we did come from convict and guard stock anyway which means we follow the rules...or get hit..
We have family -- close family -- we haven't seen since 2019, and that we don't expect to see again, at least for the foreseeable future. Last summer I heard about a family gathering in another state that we happened to passing through on a big camping trip, and I tried to negotiate to attend with a series of promises: masks, outdoor gathering, we won't try to enter your house, we'll put our tent at a campground a few miles away.
A couple days before we were supposed to get there, I got a stern warning by email, demanding that I keep my dangerous unvaxxed body FAR AWAY from the family I was trying to endanger.
I have not tried again, and have no plans to ever do so.
Trying to negotiate with such people using logic and reason is a fool's errand, as I think you've discovered.
I was invited to a Christmas-season dinner and tree-trimming party at the home of some friends of my wife's family. I've gone to such dinners a number of times in years past.
This past winter they demanded that all attendees take rapid antigen COVID tests before arriving. Over the group text chain I told them I'd share my test results just as soon I as I received Pap smear results for everyone else at the dinner. Men could submit anal Pap smear results.
I didn't attend that year.
That family soon went on to all get COVID (but probably not at this dinner).
Their COVID diagnoses prevented them from travelling to the funeral of the brother of the patriarch of that family.
Karma's funny sometimes.
I think they're finally returning to normalcy. I think the example of people like me - steadfastly clinging to rational normalcy and refusing to engage with their nonsense - might have helped a little bit.
Dam..sorry to hear about that Chris...much worse than me in that respect.I did the series of promises to stop people from pulling out from our christmas lunch.They didnt get my thinking.I said I would get PCR and RAt .....they would know my viral status..but all the vaxxed people at lunch...no one would know their vaxx status..nope.That was just crazy talk..offered to meet me in a park...I did not take up that exciting offer...
Brilliant piece. I look at the young people and what we've done and know that they'll be the ones wiping my ads when I'm 90. I expect a lot of bed sores.
Dang. House of Government is sitting there, waiting for me to get up the courage to crack it open. So now I have to add this one. I think some of you are more practiced at viewing the world in these contexts, so the rest of us have to proceed with caution or the brain’s self-protection instinct (denial) kicks in. 😆 My favorite line in The Burbs with Tom Hanks is where he’s described as not wanting to know what the neighbors are really up to, or he’d have to deal with it. There’s the mundane nothing’s-going-on view and the fantastical Satan’s-in-control view - but the truth is in the middle, and still way more disturbing than we want it to be.
Excellent stuff, yet again Chris! Loved Slezkine's House of Government as well, just ordered the book on Jones. Humans are increasingly vulnerable to this nonsense as families continue to be broken up, culture is atomized, and social media is forever pitting one group against another. Funny how they used to call it 'nudge' persuasion, why not just call it 'push'?
Willie Brown, who would become the speaker of the California State Assembly and then mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Harvey Milk described Jonestown as “a beautiful retirement community” helping to “alleviating the world food crisis.” California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally actually made a pilgrimage to Jonestown that led to a gushing reaction typical of ideological tourists.
Ah. Melitha Harreth Perry. I would respect MSNBC progressives more if they'd just admit they're totalitarians who embrace critical race theory. Pretending otherwise is insulting and laughable. She was so far left, that they fired her. It appears Jim Jones is required reading for behavioural scientists.
CRT & woke genderqueer were built to sow chaos. Even the old school Communists call it out as corporate controlled means of subjugation. It’s being used to infiltrate societies around the world. Freighting on preexisting mental disorders it induces ideological possession in primary victims and provides an irrational sophist worldview enabling violence and furthering chaos. Lesbians, gays, women, liberal whites and progress made in race relations are some of its secondary victims.
I view this weaponized phenomenon as one feature of a global war on humanity itself both an intentional and emergent happening to the benefit of a parasite class.
Blessings🙏 and courage💗upon all who stand free, do not comply with and oppose this scapegoating madness.
That was some very impressive connection making...
After Trump won in 2016, I was astounded by the liberal descent into mass delusion. When Covid hit, and many a liberal started talking about punishing the unvaccinated, dehumanizing them, cheering authoritarianism, I was appalled. When Liberals cheered the weaponization of race and gender, cancel culture and character assassination, I knew war had started. When Russia started amassing at Ukraine's border, so very exactly timed when Covid receded, I knew something deeply nefarious was afoot, confirmed when I saw Liberals wailing and gnashing their teeth, their bloodlust hardly concealed. Now the leaked Roe v Wade decision, at the same time they are apoplectic about misinformation and the scourge that is Musk buying Twitter, while Biden institutes a Ministry of Truth to their cheers....
America is the one place to mount a defense against globalist authoritarians. Hence the psyops perpetrated against us here more than anywhere. It is not cultural succession as much the deliberate forced disintegration of Nation State America.
I've known some of them for a long time, and a surprising thing is that everyone who supported Bush and the invasion of Iraq, the people who defended Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, now support forced vaccinations and grooming. They are not especially liberal or conservative, they are just a media-directed mob of sociopaths that adopt whatever costume they are told to at the time.
This is the stuff right here. People just go along.
They will buy whatever is being sold.
every notice how history remembered in the present day is only current events
and it has sides ?
It's one thing when an abusive cult run by a megalomaniacal dark triad sociopath nucleates inside an otherwise relatively healthy society. It's another thing entirely when society as a whole becomes an abusive cult.
Great piece by the way. It didn't surprise me in the slightest that Jones availed himself if sexual access to the women under his sway, that's cult leader 101. It was eyebrow-raising to find out that he engaged in systematic buck-breaking. Now, with that in mind ... what to make of the lionization of homosexuality?
About 3% of the population has always been gay, and Walt Whitman was out cheerfully celebrating virile workmen's democracy behind a long series of barns in the 19th century. But suddenly: "Gen Z adults who identify as LGBTQ has increased from 10.5% in 2017 to 20.8% in 2021."
https://www.axios.com/2022/02/17/lgbtq-generation-z-gallup
Twenty percent. That's cult-style cultural destabilization. I'm with Camille Paglia on this one – this is what a historical end stage looks like.
https://youtu.be/I8BRdwgPChQ
My impression, from talking to Gen Zers, is that a lot of that 20% are identifying with the B in LGBT. It's an easy way to join the rainbow people and therefore accrue victim cred as one of the Maoist red classes - especially compelling for white kids who otherwise go on the evil list. Saying you're bisexual requires zero commitment - you don't even have to so much as hold hands with someone of the same sex.
That said it says a lot that literally the only identifiable youth subculture is that of the be-pronouned.
Thank you for the video link. Camille Paglia is one of the giants of common sense in the face of this insanity.
She starts at 1:30
Everyone is bisexual, but not the way LGBTQ advocates think. The true sexual relationship between humans is in the quantum domain that Reality is a projection of. It is known that particles can become entangled when they are produced by an event. The same type of links happen when cells divide. Cells communicate with each other chemically, electrically and by quantum entanglement. DNA from men a woman had sex with have been found in their brains after they died. In light of this, the deep meaning of 'becomes one flesh' can be derived. The human biological unit is not man or woman but a couple that shares both parts.
Sorry, but, no. You've been misinformed regarding both Greece and Rome. In the former case, those found guilty of sodomy had their citizenship revoked. In the latter, Romans considered homosexual relations to be shameful in the extreme. As but one example, Julius Caesar spent his life trying to quash rumors that he'd engaged in a gay love affair with a Greek king in his youth. You don't do that in a culture in which bisexuality is the norm.
All of this seems to stem from mistranslations. The Greeks had multiple words for love, eg philia and eros. They would describe very close male friends as 'lovers', and when this was badly translated into English by lazy 19th century philologers they did so with the connotation of bum buddies. This then got picked up by activist classicists in the 20th century, who wanted to normalize homosexuality in the modern world by depicting antiquity as a big gay pile.
So far as Japan goes, my impression is that homosexuality was never looked on particularly kindly in that culture. Certainly not in modern times: Yukio Mishima had to hide it, for instance. And if it was frowned upon in the relatively liberal Japan of the 50s, I seriously doubt that the warrior honor culture of the Edo period or the Civil War era would have been more sexually open.
"Go read a book." Always amusing how leftists assume ignorance in their interlocutors. I've got a bookshelf packed with primary classical works and secondary sources, all of which I've read cover to cover. In none of them did I detect the slightest indication of a permissive attitude towards same sex relations.
Dover's nonsense was based on a few pornographic vases. Meanwhile, Socrates and Plato were both very clear that carnal relations between men were an abomination. There was furthermore no ambiguity on the subject in Greek law. Reasoning from smatterings of racy verse and the odd risque piece of pottery to infer general societal mores is lazy scholarship, particularly when the considerable evidence contradicting the hypothesis is simply ignored. Not that lazy scholarship is any barrier to politically motivated academics pushing a narrative that conveniently aligns ancient history with their modern social preferences, or to their shoddy work being uncritically repeated by their fellow travelers.
My gay ancient Greek professor was dismissive of Dover for some of the reasons you cite. What's interesting to me about the Phillip II of Macedon quote is that it suggests a widespread intolerance for homosexuality, not acceptance. "Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful." Of course, it's just one quote so one can't really make conclusions about where the majority was on this, but apparently Phillip II thought it was significant enough to weigh in.
I'm not bothered by homosexuality or gay marriage. But, getting the historical/anthropological evidence correct is important.
I appreciate the back and forth (absent the frustrated ad hominems) that you and Tano had.
God Almighty! What a horrific nightmare!
Thank you for writing these two essays, Chris, and for the book recommendations.
Unfortunately, a lot of "well-meaning" parents ruin their children using these and similar techniques, though not necessarily to the extreme degree that Jim Jones used them. I'm one of four children born to a pair of emotionally (or psychologically) sick parents. I'd say our spirits were certainly damaged, if not actually broken, by the bad parenting we experienced.
I'm painfully aware of how sick our parents were and how badly I was treated. I can't speak for exactly how my siblings feel about the parenting they received, though I'm pretty sure they're in a tremendous amount of denial about how damaging it was. I see this in their hideous sycophancy to our demented, sick, sadistic, egotistical, arrogant, unbelievably narcissistic father.
Our mother died over twenty-two years ago. I hated and feared her all my life, and I've never once missed her. I was emotionally distant from my father all my life, and at this point I hate him with a burning passion. He is a monster. I seriously considered running away from home when I was a teenager. To this day I honestly think I'd have been better off had I done so.
Painful. That's a lot to overcome.
God, yes.
Great piece. I guess what stands out to me is that the insanity of Peoples Temple can still be traced to one deranged, but charismatic, individual: Jones, who was methodical and deliberate in his approach. But when you look at what's happening today, it feels a lot more distributed - it feels harder (at least for me) to trace the rot to a single source, and therefore is more difficult to deal with.
Maybe there is no single source, but some combination of 1) post-modernism (and attending decline in faith), 2) the internet providing endless content and frictionless distribution, and 3) wealth inequality and an increasingly entrenched elite class? Just thinking out loud, welcome any thoughts.
I would add the contribution of the New Left in the 1960s, in arguments like this one:
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html
Mattias Desmet, a professor of psychology in Ghent, has a lot to say about what he calls "mass formation," and others call "mass psychosis." His book, the Psychology of Totalitarianism, will be published soon (June 23, 2022.) In the meantime you can find speeches he's given in the past several months online.
I think there's a lot of conflation between the concepts of mass formation and mass psychosis. The latter is simply a collective madness; the Dutch tulip bubble could be an example. The former is predicated on mass psychosis, but also involves the crystallization of that psychotic state into a paranoid, malign, punitive, totalitarianism that hasn't simply gone mad, but also demands that everyone go mad.
While Desmet doesn't mention it as far as I know, his mass formation concept has considerable overlap with ponerology - the study of evil as applied to politics. In a ponerogenic process one also accounts for the influence of characteropathic individuals (narcissists, sociopaths, etc.) as well as schizoid personality types, who can act as the nucleating element around which a seriously bad mass formation can take place.
In the People's Temple example, Jones and his immediate helpers are the ponerogenic element; the followers are the mass formation.
Re ponerology, you see this in both parties today. I find both to be repulsive in their almost total lack of ability to solve problems. It's like they live only to oppose their counterparts, to such an extreme that you could argue that they constitute a single entity.
They, at least those in elective office, live only to raise money for their next election. Any thought, effort or activity outside of that is alien to them.
No, most, especially on the Left, live to extend their *power over people*. *That*
is why (in the US) the Democrat-controlled areas and schools were the most locked down - the Left loves *power* they derived fron the fear.
Compared to the lust for power, mere greed is banal. See the 20th century history of the USSR and China if you think otherwise.
Please tell us that ponerology has a redemptive practical side? I am fascinated to hear of ponerology for the first time. Evil applied to politics must be a vast subject. Depending on how those two terms are framed, I imagine it might describe everyday 'banal' human events, or does it confine itself to the exceptional ones? Whether ponerology takes a broad or narrow focus, how can it inform healing of individuals and communities?
There's a substack covering the topic if you'd like to learn more:
https://ponerology.substack.com/
Although the book is the best place to learn about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Psychopathy-Totalitarianism/dp/1734907452/ref=mp_s_a_1_1
Your 3) gets closest to the root cause, but for my money the issue isn't an elite per se - there's always an elite - but rather the nature of that elite. The managerial class who currently serve as our elite have essentially all of the classic sociopathic personality traits at a collective level (manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness, etc.), which sets up perfect conditions for ponerogenesis. The paralogic of postmodernism is ultimately a symptom of their influence: look at any ponerized system in history and you'll find the same use of slippery word games and broken logic used to justify absurdity and atrocity.
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world.
Seth Barron review of
Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, by Daniel J. Flynn (ISI Books, 330 pp., $27.95)
https://www.city-journal.org/jim-jones-san-francisco
wow... had no idea.
It’s weird because my vaxxer friends would say I’m the cult member and been brainwashed but I think it’s them that are deluded. That’s the problem these days. We can’t point our fingers and go that place, that cult, that’s gotta go! because everyone is socially entangled. So perplexing but thank you for a wonderful, thought provoking piece. Well done!!
Same here...I have friends who will not let me in their house because their brain has melted and they cannot discern any difference between vax status and viral status..but Australians did get a hell of a lot of lockdowns, continuous case updates and a dash of rubber bullets..to help remove the spine and brain of most of us...we did come from convict and guard stock anyway which means we follow the rules...or get hit..
We have family -- close family -- we haven't seen since 2019, and that we don't expect to see again, at least for the foreseeable future. Last summer I heard about a family gathering in another state that we happened to passing through on a big camping trip, and I tried to negotiate to attend with a series of promises: masks, outdoor gathering, we won't try to enter your house, we'll put our tent at a campground a few miles away.
A couple days before we were supposed to get there, I got a stern warning by email, demanding that I keep my dangerous unvaxxed body FAR AWAY from the family I was trying to endanger.
I have not tried again, and have no plans to ever do so.
Trying to negotiate with such people using logic and reason is a fool's errand, as I think you've discovered.
I was invited to a Christmas-season dinner and tree-trimming party at the home of some friends of my wife's family. I've gone to such dinners a number of times in years past.
This past winter they demanded that all attendees take rapid antigen COVID tests before arriving. Over the group text chain I told them I'd share my test results just as soon I as I received Pap smear results for everyone else at the dinner. Men could submit anal Pap smear results.
I didn't attend that year.
That family soon went on to all get COVID (but probably not at this dinner).
Their COVID diagnoses prevented them from travelling to the funeral of the brother of the patriarch of that family.
Karma's funny sometimes.
I think they're finally returning to normalcy. I think the example of people like me - steadfastly clinging to rational normalcy and refusing to engage with their nonsense - might have helped a little bit.
Dam..sorry to hear about that Chris...much worse than me in that respect.I did the series of promises to stop people from pulling out from our christmas lunch.They didnt get my thinking.I said I would get PCR and RAt .....they would know my viral status..but all the vaxxed people at lunch...no one would know their vaxx status..nope.That was just crazy talk..offered to meet me in a park...I did not take up that exciting offer...
Brilliant piece. I look at the young people and what we've done and know that they'll be the ones wiping my ads when I'm 90. I expect a lot of bed sores.
Spot on! I know cults and I know the Left, and this is all right on target.
I never hated anything so much in my life and still agreed with it.
Sorry!
Dang. House of Government is sitting there, waiting for me to get up the courage to crack it open. So now I have to add this one. I think some of you are more practiced at viewing the world in these contexts, so the rest of us have to proceed with caution or the brain’s self-protection instinct (denial) kicks in. 😆 My favorite line in The Burbs with Tom Hanks is where he’s described as not wanting to know what the neighbors are really up to, or he’d have to deal with it. There’s the mundane nothing’s-going-on view and the fantastical Satan’s-in-control view - but the truth is in the middle, and still way more disturbing than we want it to be.
Excellent stuff, yet again Chris! Loved Slezkine's House of Government as well, just ordered the book on Jones. Humans are increasingly vulnerable to this nonsense as families continue to be broken up, culture is atomized, and social media is forever pitting one group against another. Funny how they used to call it 'nudge' persuasion, why not just call it 'push'?
Willie Brown, who would become the speaker of the California State Assembly and then mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Harvey Milk described Jonestown as “a beautiful retirement community” helping to “alleviating the world food crisis.” California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally actually made a pilgrimage to Jonestown that led to a gushing reaction typical of ideological tourists.
Ah. Melitha Harreth Perry. I would respect MSNBC progressives more if they'd just admit they're totalitarians who embrace critical race theory. Pretending otherwise is insulting and laughable. She was so far left, that they fired her. It appears Jim Jones is required reading for behavioural scientists.
CRT & woke genderqueer were built to sow chaos. Even the old school Communists call it out as corporate controlled means of subjugation. It’s being used to infiltrate societies around the world. Freighting on preexisting mental disorders it induces ideological possession in primary victims and provides an irrational sophist worldview enabling violence and furthering chaos. Lesbians, gays, women, liberal whites and progress made in race relations are some of its secondary victims.
I view this weaponized phenomenon as one feature of a global war on humanity itself both an intentional and emergent happening to the benefit of a parasite class.
Blessings🙏 and courage💗upon all who stand free, do not comply with and oppose this scapegoating madness.
Two well written, well articulated pieces Chris.
Thanks!
https://www.nanaimobulletin.com/news/b-c-researchers-develop-game-to-address-vaccine-concerns-among-young-adults/
Did he play board games with the youngsters? Because now you can!! And encourage them to take those shots! So crazy!
I just let out a heavy sigh that may have been audible from outer space.