I love this denial of reality. Virtually everyone I know who got the vaccine got COVID, so obviously it doesn't prevent transmission, but perhaps we're redefining "transmission" now.
"But if you hadn't been vaccinated, it would've been worse"
"It's because everyone didn't vaccinate that the ones that did get sick"
"If everyone had masked up and stayed at home, it would have been gone"
Soon as you provide reasoned arguments backed by facts against one of the above, the Covidian switches to one of the other two, again and again and again.
Reason and arguments does not against unreason and emtions work.
As Cleveland Clinic (and many other venues) showed, the more vaccine doses, the more COVID. Negative efficacy of the COVID vaccines is irrefutable at this point.
Establishment Dems Outraged as Court Bans Biden & FBI From Coercing Big Tech Censorship; NYT Defends Illegal Domestic Surveillance | SYSTEM UPDATE #110
"The only way to reason yourself into this conclusion is to switch off your awareness of all forms of history and knowledge. You somehow have to know nothing. The experts have spoken, so the discussion is over!"
This is what frightens me. I used to cover education, and I was very interested in school reform efforts. One of the great catchphrases among so-called educators since the early 1990s is "critical thinking" or "critical thinking skills." Specific knowledge isn't so important. Who cares when the Battle of Hastings was fought, or where, or why? Armed with critical thinking skills—and, I suppose, a web browser—students will know the right questions to ask and get the answers they need.
But it never seemed to occur to the boosters of "critical thinking" that, absent a basis of knowledge, you have no idea what to think critically about. What you get instead is a generation of ignoramuses who are all too willing to accept the pronouncements of "experts" at face value. What you get, in short, is a population full of subjects, not self-governing citizens.
By "critical thinking skills" they meant, "critical theory," that is the unceasing doubt and criticism of all tradition. They didn't mean one should question John Dewey, Ancel Keys or Anthony Fauci. The Socratic spirit of inquiry is NOT what they wanted or what was/is taught.
I generally agree. The only thing I would add is that John Dewey doesn't exercise nearly the influence he once did in the ed schools. They get something like a Xerox of a carbon copy of a summary of Dewey. Now if you want to talk about bad influences, let's talk about Paulo Freire . . . Or maybe let's not!
It's actually George S. Counts who empowered teachers to "reconstruct American society."
Excerpt from Willing Accomplices:
In his bold proclamation, printed as a series of pamphlets capturing his PEA speeches, as Dare the School Build a New Social Order, Counts broke with Dewey’s ideas of child-centered education, and proclaimed the need for “imposition and indoctrination.”
He argued that he and his fellow Progressives had been timid, had professed and theorized, and not acted in concert with their beliefs. Counts’ argument was fundamentally Marxist, in tone and terminology, but never referenced Marx. His themes included class, class conflict, anarchy of extreme individualism, race hatred, reconstruction of society; democracy vs. industrial feudalism, capital must belong to the masses, not the favored few.
In his PEA speeches, He spoke (and spoke, and spoke, and spoke) condescendingly of “the masses,” “the minds of the masses.” He said “natural resources and all important forms of capital will have to be collectively owned.”
Counts went on to demand that “the resulting system of production and distribution be made to serve directly the masses of the people.”
He ended his speeches with a call to action to his fellow Progressive Educators, in effect a call to bloody revolution: “If democracy is to be achieved…powerful classes must be persuaded to surrender their privileges…this process has commonly been attended by bitter struggle and even bloodshed.”
In a shot across the bow of the American bourgeoisie, Counts warned his comrades, “Ruling classes never surrender their privileges voluntarily.”
Hate speech is free speech. If the speech produces action that is immoral then let the action be prosecuted and the speech prosecuted as incitement or conspiracy as appropriate. If hate speech doesn't produce immoral action it might be untrue, it might be impolite, but it is not a priori immoral.
💬 Galileo was almost executed 70 years later for promoting Heliocentrism.
<sigh>
It's well past time to dethrone the too-well-established Galileo trial myth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🗨 Prior to 1615 the Church simply did not care about Galileo or any other mathematicus or astronomer accepting heliocentrism. Galileo did not hide his acceptance of Copernicanism, while for their part the Church authorities generally saw the whole issue of the various competing cosmological models as something for the natural philosophers and “geometers” to sort out among themselves.
🗨 There were two separate debates going on in the second half of the sixteenth century which began to converge in the early seventeenth century and finally collided in the Galileo Affair. The first was the debate about cosmology; one that began with Copernicus and intensified with new astronomical observations starting with the supernova of 1572. The second was a debate about how the Council of Trent’s rulings on Biblical interpretation should be understood and applied.
By cultural osmosis as it were, we've uncritically absorbed a caricature of actual history—well-documented in abundant records—which is never as straightforward as textbooks would have us believe.
Every attempted justification makes it more obvious that this entire issue is purely about power. They want it, and they will shut you up to get it. But the mask is off and it's hard to take the media seriously about this issue when they were constantly on the wrong side of it for the last X years.
Because our supposed expert elite class really has only one actual skill, the manipulation of language with the goal of manipulating and controlling people, they will keep coming up with different words, phrases, and various rhetorical panic buttons to repeatedly say the same thing: Do what we say and OBEY at all times or else we will silence and attack you.
They've all been trained in the postmodern academy to believe first and foremost: Nothing exists but Power. And every day in every way they show themselves to be loyal to the cause: They have Power and will use it to lie endlessly in their eternal quest to gain total and unassailable control, that is: a postdemocratic surveillance state overseen by a class of unelected and untouchable "experts".
Meet the New Left, same as the Old Left: Nothing matters except Who/Whom.
My 83 year old mother was visiting me for July 4th and we were cutting up vegetables. She was shocked to see me throwing the vegetable waste in the trash: “They just passed a new law in California that says you have to separate vegetable waste from the trash and put into the green waste trash can. To combat climate change.”
I replied, “How are they going to enforce that? Who’s going to enforce that?”
The point is, the government has coerced my mom to do something that probably makes no sense for the reasons given, and have made her afraid not to comply.
Now, if someone wants to recycle their vegetable waste, no one cares. I just don’t want the government telling me I HAVE to.
The California bureaucratic class has to be the largest assemblage of mediocre non-entities in all history. they are a parasite class that will eventually kill off the golden goose that is the Golden State.
We've had separate bins for "compostable" and "burnable" household trash over here for some 30 years now, works like a charm. Of course, it wasn't instituted to "save the planet" or anything - the burnable stuff is burned in garbage-burning power/heat-plants with among the best filtration systems on the planet, and the compostable stuff gets turned into "bio-gas" and is turned into fuel.
Every local municipality has a huge sorting station, with some 20 different 30 cubic meter sized bins where you bring your garbage. Hard plastic goes there, unpainted wood over there, bricks go on the pile over there, and so on. Staff is usually middle-aged men and women with some previous work-induced disability, doing work-as-rehabilitation to get back into the labour market proper.
Maybe tip off your politicians to look at how Sweden handles trash and garbage, it's one of the things we're still good at (we even import stuff for the garbage-powered power plants)?
When they introduced this when I lived in San Francisco they sent around inspectors to look in garbage cans. If memory serves, the inspectors were paid 100k a year plus benefits. First-time violators got off with a warning, second-time violators got a hefty fine with threats of more severe punishment for further violations. a few people I know would throw their vegetable waste in other people's ordinary garbage. Hilarity ensued!
Wait, that’s another law I’m supposed to be following? Crap I’m a criminal yet again. Here’s the rub. When I lived in Tx my trash was picked up twice a week for about $25 a month. I recycled because I had room in the trash cans and it was easy. Now I’m in Ca. I pay $90ish a month for trash pick up once week. Now my recycle can has lots of non-recyclable trash because the trash can they allow us use is to small and always gets to full. The harder you make it for people to follow the rules the more likely they are to work around the rules. Fortunately I’m in the redneck part of Ca and no one checks.
Their default position assumes 'the expert' is always right or correct. However, without banter, discourse and debate, there's no incentive for 'the expert' to adjust, seek alternate views or recognize they, in fact, could be wrong. No humility. No truth.
Those familiar with Eastern European literature (Czech and Russian in particular) during the rule of the Soviet Union, will note that it wasn't all gulags and secret police. They didn't need too much of that to control the population. All they needed to do was fuck with their minds. Sorta like you discuss on your stack. It's all psychological terror. The propaganda of 'disinformation' is designed to have people second guess themselves. To erode confidence in their own critical thinking abilities (hello ZDogg!). 'Disinformation' is the monster under the bed that will yank your ankles and take you away to Disinformation Land where all the monsters are.
'Mommy, I read that...."
"Shhh. Honey. You'll end up in Disinformation Land."
One-way information while erasing alternate views IS the totalitarianism we need to face. THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! I still shiver at that after watching it for the first time over 40 years ago. Soon after I watched The Shining. I was barely 11. Mom 'could' have regulated my TV intake a little better.
Anyway.
This is Canada's - ahem alleged - 'top' Judge. Tonight on Top Judge!
I swear. I'm the guy in the room who looks around wondering if anyone is noticing all of this only to discover that maybe there's only one other person who may make eye contact with you.
These people operate in another dimension.
Oh. That judge? Yeh, he publicly ranted against the truckers.
THIS is it. THIS is what totalitarianism looks like. LOOK at it. Now the Canadian government finds itself in a completely unnecessary war with Google and Meta of their own doing. Now that social media won't play ball, the response is to claim they're violating Bill C-21. A poorly thought out idiotic bill no one wanted and universally condemned as experts warned they were picking an unnecessary fight for no gain. It points to a complete and total ignorance of how social media operates. Now the Canadian government (and of course Quebec. A place that embraces just about anything stupid) has ceased advertising on social media. Like anyone cares.
And nothing happened. You think Canadians are misinformed with propaganda now? Wait until they're cut off from more information moving forward. They'll be impossible to talk to they'll be completely overrun with state jingoism and jargon from CBC and CTV (who now call people fighting the carbon tax - anti-taxers.). The gap in knowledge and information at the dinner table with family and friends will only widen. Just a guess.
There's even a specific term for it in german: Zersetzung. Roughly "decomposition" (or "disruption"). Decompostion is basically the same as deconstruction, something I find rather telling given that the underlying method and ontological angle of the modern Woke-Left comes - in -part - from french postmodernism and poststructuralism, which are all about the deconstruction of established (societal-cultural) knowledge, norms, truths, and so on.
Ripping a quote from the Wikipedia (sorry) article, where Wiki for once quotes an actual historian:
"The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions. (Hubertus Knabe, German historian)
Now, what is that if not a description of how the US, Russia, Iran, the EU and China uses "social media"?
"Imagine being stupid enough to say that out loud."
It's not really stupidity. I know it feels like stupidity, and the best thing to do is to treat it as such (because ridicule is definitely the best weapon here as it is far more powerful than their sanctimonious gravitas), but what it really is, is an attempt to redefine words and thereby reshape a shared reality.
You see, these people realize that we have a First Amendment and some of us are quite attached to it. It guarantees your right to free speech. But what is "speech" exactly? They wish to define "speech" as the articulation of "true" things, "acceptable" things, "emotionally safe" things. Other articulations that might not fit in those categories should not be "speech" to these people. They are . . . misinformation and disinformation, articulations that they wish to imbue with a near physical malignancy so we will back away from them as we would any physical toxin. They want everyone to agree that "speech" as a legal and moral concept cannot include things that the "experts" deem misinformation and disinformation. (A Model T comes in any color you want as long as you only want black--you can say anything you want as long as you only want to say those things they deem legitimate "speech.")
I know you know this, but it is important to reiterate: language is power because language shapes thought, which, to a great degree, shapes a shared reality. We will only survive finding the humor in the situation, but there should be a cutting edge to our laugh. And we should start pointing out to them, as you so eloquently do, that we know what they are up to and we will not go along.
While there are technological advances to be acknowledged which have simultaneously advanced both the dissemination and suppression of speech, and there are theoretical nuances to the methodologies employed, again we are the most sophisticated marketing/propaganda culture in history, these amount to relatively minor dissimilarities in the comparison of Soviet propaganda objectives and what we are currently experiencing. According to the Soviet propagandists and our own “misinformation specialists” (who seem to have popped up out of nowhere in the past few years...), there is only correct speech to advance party goals. Everything else is punishable. These are Commies. If it walks, talks, and acts like a Commie, it’s a Commie, not a “misinformation specialist”. It’s more acceptable to call them Socialists, but Commie is more accurate in contemptuous tone and exposing their true motivations. It’s all copy and paste for these numbskulls.
From Wikipedia:
“Propaganda in the Soviet Union was the practice of state-directed communication to promote class conflict, internationalism, the goals of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the party itself....
...The main Soviet censorship body, Glavlit, was employed not only to eliminate any undesirable printed materials but also "to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item."[1] Under Stalinism, deviation from the dictates of official propaganda was punished by execution and labor camps.[citation needed] Afterwards, such punitive measures were replaced by punitive psychiatry, prison, denial of work, and loss of citizenship. "Today a man only talks freely to his wife – at night, with the blankets pulled over his head," the writer Isaac Babel privately told a trusted friend.[2]
And:
“An important goal of Soviet propaganda was to create a New Soviet man. Schools and Communist youth organizations such as the Young Pioneers and Komsomol served to remove children from the "petit-bourgeois" family and indoctrinate the next generation into the "collective way of life". The idea that the upbringing of children was the concern of their parents was explicitly rejected.[5] One schooling theorist stated:
We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family... We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state – that is our task.[6]
Those born after the Russian Revolution were explicitly told that they were to build a utopia of brotherhood and justice, and to not be like their parents, but completely Red.[7] "Lenin's corners", "political shrines for the display of propaganda about the god-like founder of the Soviet state", were established in all schools.[6] Schools conducted marches, songs, and pledges of allegiance to Soviet leadership. One of the purposes was to instill in children the idea that they are involved in the world revolution, which is more important than any family ties. Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father to the secret police NKVD, was promoted as a great positive example.[6]
Teachers in economic and social sciences were particularly responsible for inculcating "unshakable" Marxist–Leninist views.[8] All teachers were prone to strictly follow the plan for educating children approved by the top for reasons of safety, which could cause serious problems dealing with social events that, having just happened, were not included in the plan.[9] Children of "socially alien" elements were often the target of abuse or expelled, in the name of class struggle.[10] Early in the regime, many teachers were drawn into Soviet plans for schooling because of a passion for literacy and numeracy, which the Soviets were attempting to spread.[11]”
Thank God that we still gave a few federal judges who are not ruling in Pravdaesque language and from an inverted Commie reality.
Getting his Stalin dashboard bobble head, of course. Stalin was remarkable because he killed everybody, including those who helped him with his most dastardly purges against anybody thought to be an enemy, even when they weren’t.
Hiroaki Kuromiya
The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007
My great aunt is the subject of one of the vignettes of murdered innocents.
Agree that "we are the most sophisticated marketing/propaganda culture in history". Technology has enabled us to disseminate more information. Much, much more information - faster, much faster, than ever before in human history. But that same technology, like virtually every other technological advance, has been weaponized. Used to attempt to gain some perceived advantage for one group of people over another.
Information is neither intrinsically "good" nor "bad". The uses to which that information may be put may, of course, be "good" nor "bad", depending on who is making the call. And currently, our governments, and their the sycophants, the legacy media, have decreed that any information that disagrees with the official narrative of the day is "bad". AKA "Mis", "mal", or "dis" information. Truth, observed reality, even mathematical precision are irrelevant. "Good or "bad" is ONLY measured against which ever "expert" is ascendant - now. At this instant.
Unfortunately, the narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths we began to put in charge of our indoctrination centres (formerly “schools”), over fifty years ago, chose to adopt the Soviet methodology illustrated in your Wiki excerpt. And we let them!
I quite honestly always have to take a moment when I see the title "disinformation expert" because I have to work at remembering that it doesn't mean (at least not intentionally on the part of those sporting it) a person who is an expert at disseminating lies, which then makes me confused about what they are trying to say.
It comes from compartmentalization of the brain. Speech goes in one folder and disinformation in another. Anything in the speech folder is good. Anything in the disinformation folder is bad. It's that simple. Reclassification has to be properly done with all of the paperwork in order.
Sort of like if you have a paper that says classified it doesn't matter if the information on it has been declassified by an original declassification authority it is still a classified piece of paper if that piece of paper isn't properly annotated by the guy who marks declassified papers as declassified.
“The injunction “carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech.” Imagine being stupid enough to say that out loud.” Oh my gosh! I was thinking the same thing when I read that. How stupid can you be? It’s like they don’t even WANT common sense. It is, after all, common.
Well they have probably injected the most luciferase and we know that some parts of the injection go to the brain so..ipso facto their brains are really bright under certain wavelengths of light
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Perfect illustration of the point:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1677005062109790226
I love this denial of reality. Virtually everyone I know who got the vaccine got COVID, so obviously it doesn't prevent transmission, but perhaps we're redefining "transmission" now.
"But if you hadn't been vaccinated, it would've been worse"
"It's because everyone didn't vaccinate that the ones that did get sick"
"If everyone had masked up and stayed at home, it would have been gone"
Soon as you provide reasoned arguments backed by facts against one of the above, the Covidian switches to one of the other two, again and again and again.
Reason and arguments does not against unreason and emtions work.
It is a religious belief now. Hard to shake with out a miracle or two to break the delusions...
As Cleveland Clinic (and many other venues) showed, the more vaccine doses, the more COVID. Negative efficacy of the COVID vaccines is irrefutable at this point.
And yet still disputed among "respectable" people. There's no amount of obviousness that will allow them to see it.
Also from Glenn, awesome analysis of the ruling:
Establishment Dems Outraged as Court Bans Biden & FBI From Coercing Big Tech Censorship; NYT Defends Illegal Domestic Surveillance | SYSTEM UPDATE #110
https://rumble.com/v2ybni6-system-update-show-110.html
"The only way to reason yourself into this conclusion is to switch off your awareness of all forms of history and knowledge. You somehow have to know nothing. The experts have spoken, so the discussion is over!"
This is what frightens me. I used to cover education, and I was very interested in school reform efforts. One of the great catchphrases among so-called educators since the early 1990s is "critical thinking" or "critical thinking skills." Specific knowledge isn't so important. Who cares when the Battle of Hastings was fought, or where, or why? Armed with critical thinking skills—and, I suppose, a web browser—students will know the right questions to ask and get the answers they need.
But it never seemed to occur to the boosters of "critical thinking" that, absent a basis of knowledge, you have no idea what to think critically about. What you get instead is a generation of ignoramuses who are all too willing to accept the pronouncements of "experts" at face value. What you get, in short, is a population full of subjects, not self-governing citizens.
By "critical thinking skills" they meant, "critical theory," that is the unceasing doubt and criticism of all tradition. They didn't mean one should question John Dewey, Ancel Keys or Anthony Fauci. The Socratic spirit of inquiry is NOT what they wanted or what was/is taught.
I generally agree. The only thing I would add is that John Dewey doesn't exercise nearly the influence he once did in the ed schools. They get something like a Xerox of a carbon copy of a summary of Dewey. Now if you want to talk about bad influences, let's talk about Paulo Freire . . . Or maybe let's not!
It's actually George S. Counts who empowered teachers to "reconstruct American society."
Excerpt from Willing Accomplices:
In his bold proclamation, printed as a series of pamphlets capturing his PEA speeches, as Dare the School Build a New Social Order, Counts broke with Dewey’s ideas of child-centered education, and proclaimed the need for “imposition and indoctrination.”
He argued that he and his fellow Progressives had been timid, had professed and theorized, and not acted in concert with their beliefs. Counts’ argument was fundamentally Marxist, in tone and terminology, but never referenced Marx. His themes included class, class conflict, anarchy of extreme individualism, race hatred, reconstruction of society; democracy vs. industrial feudalism, capital must belong to the masses, not the favored few.
In his PEA speeches, He spoke (and spoke, and spoke, and spoke) condescendingly of “the masses,” “the minds of the masses.” He said “natural resources and all important forms of capital will have to be collectively owned.”
Counts went on to demand that “the resulting system of production and distribution be made to serve directly the masses of the people.”
He ended his speeches with a call to action to his fellow Progressive Educators, in effect a call to bloody revolution: “If democracy is to be achieved…powerful classes must be persuaded to surrender their privileges…this process has commonly been attended by bitter struggle and even bloodshed.”
In a shot across the bow of the American bourgeoisie, Counts warned his comrades, “Ruling classes never surrender their privileges voluntarily.”
www.willingaccomplices.com
Indeed.
I believe that is what the democrat control mongers want.
Power is their all consuming priority.
*a web browser. I don't know why I can't edit that.
Hate speech is free speech. If the speech produces action that is immoral then let the action be prosecuted and the speech prosecuted as incitement or conspiracy as appropriate. If hate speech doesn't produce immoral action it might be untrue, it might be impolite, but it is not a priori immoral.
💬 Galileo was almost executed 70 years later for promoting Heliocentrism.
<sigh>
It's well past time to dethrone the too-well-established Galileo trial myth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🗨 Prior to 1615 the Church simply did not care about Galileo or any other mathematicus or astronomer accepting heliocentrism. Galileo did not hide his acceptance of Copernicanism, while for their part the Church authorities generally saw the whole issue of the various competing cosmological models as something for the natural philosophers and “geometers” to sort out among themselves.
🗨 There were two separate debates going on in the second half of the sixteenth century which began to converge in the early seventeenth century and finally collided in the Galileo Affair. The first was the debate about cosmology; one that began with Copernicus and intensified with new astronomical observations starting with the supernova of 1572. The second was a debate about how the Council of Trent’s rulings on Biblical interpretation should be understood and applied.
historyforatheists.com/2022/12/interview-sebastian-major-on-galileo-and-history-myths <-- helpful links can be found there for a deeper dive 👌🙂
By cultural osmosis as it were, we've uncritically absorbed a caricature of actual history—well-documented in abundant records—which is never as straightforward as textbooks would have us believe.
Yes. Exactly. And how do we know AI makes mistakes? In part because we _read_. But we're living in a post-literate era now.
You mean AI traffics in..... misinformation??
I can no longer distinguish between dis information and dat information.
Thanks. I needed dat.
Every attempted justification makes it more obvious that this entire issue is purely about power. They want it, and they will shut you up to get it. But the mask is off and it's hard to take the media seriously about this issue when they were constantly on the wrong side of it for the last X years.
Because our supposed expert elite class really has only one actual skill, the manipulation of language with the goal of manipulating and controlling people, they will keep coming up with different words, phrases, and various rhetorical panic buttons to repeatedly say the same thing: Do what we say and OBEY at all times or else we will silence and attack you.
They've all been trained in the postmodern academy to believe first and foremost: Nothing exists but Power. And every day in every way they show themselves to be loyal to the cause: They have Power and will use it to lie endlessly in their eternal quest to gain total and unassailable control, that is: a postdemocratic surveillance state overseen by a class of unelected and untouchable "experts".
Meet the New Left, same as the Old Left: Nothing matters except Who/Whom.
An anecdote about power and fear:
My 83 year old mother was visiting me for July 4th and we were cutting up vegetables. She was shocked to see me throwing the vegetable waste in the trash: “They just passed a new law in California that says you have to separate vegetable waste from the trash and put into the green waste trash can. To combat climate change.”
I replied, “How are they going to enforce that? Who’s going to enforce that?”
The point is, the government has coerced my mom to do something that probably makes no sense for the reasons given, and have made her afraid not to comply.
Now, if someone wants to recycle their vegetable waste, no one cares. I just don’t want the government telling me I HAVE to.
The California bureaucratic class has to be the largest assemblage of mediocre non-entities in all history. they are a parasite class that will eventually kill off the golden goose that is the Golden State.
Sounds real weird.
We've had separate bins for "compostable" and "burnable" household trash over here for some 30 years now, works like a charm. Of course, it wasn't instituted to "save the planet" or anything - the burnable stuff is burned in garbage-burning power/heat-plants with among the best filtration systems on the planet, and the compostable stuff gets turned into "bio-gas" and is turned into fuel.
Every local municipality has a huge sorting station, with some 20 different 30 cubic meter sized bins where you bring your garbage. Hard plastic goes there, unpainted wood over there, bricks go on the pile over there, and so on. Staff is usually middle-aged men and women with some previous work-induced disability, doing work-as-rehabilitation to get back into the labour market proper.
Maybe tip off your politicians to look at how Sweden handles trash and garbage, it's one of the things we're still good at (we even import stuff for the garbage-powered power plants)?
When they introduced this when I lived in San Francisco they sent around inspectors to look in garbage cans. If memory serves, the inspectors were paid 100k a year plus benefits. First-time violators got off with a warning, second-time violators got a hefty fine with threats of more severe punishment for further violations. a few people I know would throw their vegetable waste in other people's ordinary garbage. Hilarity ensued!
Authoritarianism at its best!
Wait, that’s another law I’m supposed to be following? Crap I’m a criminal yet again. Here’s the rub. When I lived in Tx my trash was picked up twice a week for about $25 a month. I recycled because I had room in the trash cans and it was easy. Now I’m in Ca. I pay $90ish a month for trash pick up once week. Now my recycle can has lots of non-recyclable trash because the trash can they allow us use is to small and always gets to full. The harder you make it for people to follow the rules the more likely they are to work around the rules. Fortunately I’m in the redneck part of Ca and no one checks.
They throw most of the recycling away anyway. It’s a scam. Very little ends up recycled like 20-35%.
Their default position assumes 'the expert' is always right or correct. However, without banter, discourse and debate, there's no incentive for 'the expert' to adjust, seek alternate views or recognize they, in fact, could be wrong. No humility. No truth.
Those familiar with Eastern European literature (Czech and Russian in particular) during the rule of the Soviet Union, will note that it wasn't all gulags and secret police. They didn't need too much of that to control the population. All they needed to do was fuck with their minds. Sorta like you discuss on your stack. It's all psychological terror. The propaganda of 'disinformation' is designed to have people second guess themselves. To erode confidence in their own critical thinking abilities (hello ZDogg!). 'Disinformation' is the monster under the bed that will yank your ankles and take you away to Disinformation Land where all the monsters are.
'Mommy, I read that...."
"Shhh. Honey. You'll end up in Disinformation Land."
One-way information while erasing alternate views IS the totalitarianism we need to face. THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! I still shiver at that after watching it for the first time over 40 years ago. Soon after I watched The Shining. I was barely 11. Mom 'could' have regulated my TV intake a little better.
Anyway.
This is Canada's - ahem alleged - 'top' Judge. Tonight on Top Judge!
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/misinformation-can-distort-national-debates-on-important-issues-chief-justice-warns-1.6450299
I swear. I'm the guy in the room who looks around wondering if anyone is noticing all of this only to discover that maybe there's only one other person who may make eye contact with you.
These people operate in another dimension.
Oh. That judge? Yeh, he publicly ranted against the truckers.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-supreme-court-undermined-by-chief-justice-condemning-freedom-convoy
THIS is it. THIS is what totalitarianism looks like. LOOK at it. Now the Canadian government finds itself in a completely unnecessary war with Google and Meta of their own doing. Now that social media won't play ball, the response is to claim they're violating Bill C-21. A poorly thought out idiotic bill no one wanted and universally condemned as experts warned they were picking an unnecessary fight for no gain. It points to a complete and total ignorance of how social media operates. Now the Canadian government (and of course Quebec. A place that embraces just about anything stupid) has ceased advertising on social media. Like anyone cares.
And nothing happened. You think Canadians are misinformed with propaganda now? Wait until they're cut off from more information moving forward. They'll be impossible to talk to they'll be completely overrun with state jingoism and jargon from CBC and CTV (who now call people fighting the carbon tax - anti-taxers.). The gap in knowledge and information at the dinner table with family and friends will only widen. Just a guess.
Alas.
There's even a specific term for it in german: Zersetzung. Roughly "decomposition" (or "disruption"). Decompostion is basically the same as deconstruction, something I find rather telling given that the underlying method and ontological angle of the modern Woke-Left comes - in -part - from french postmodernism and poststructuralism, which are all about the deconstruction of established (societal-cultural) knowledge, norms, truths, and so on.
Ripping a quote from the Wikipedia (sorry) article, where Wiki for once quotes an actual historian:
"The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions. (Hubertus Knabe, German historian)
Now, what is that if not a description of how the US, Russia, Iran, the EU and China uses "social media"?
It's working.
Dude, only "experts" can disagree with other "experts".....and you sir, are no expert. Nor am I. So, we should just be quiet, apparently.
Hmmm. Why am I having difficulty visualizing YOU "being quiet"?
👀
But you are expert at knowing you are not an expert (sort of like Socrates), therefore you are an ...
"Imagine being stupid enough to say that out loud."
It's not really stupidity. I know it feels like stupidity, and the best thing to do is to treat it as such (because ridicule is definitely the best weapon here as it is far more powerful than their sanctimonious gravitas), but what it really is, is an attempt to redefine words and thereby reshape a shared reality.
You see, these people realize that we have a First Amendment and some of us are quite attached to it. It guarantees your right to free speech. But what is "speech" exactly? They wish to define "speech" as the articulation of "true" things, "acceptable" things, "emotionally safe" things. Other articulations that might not fit in those categories should not be "speech" to these people. They are . . . misinformation and disinformation, articulations that they wish to imbue with a near physical malignancy so we will back away from them as we would any physical toxin. They want everyone to agree that "speech" as a legal and moral concept cannot include things that the "experts" deem misinformation and disinformation. (A Model T comes in any color you want as long as you only want black--you can say anything you want as long as you only want to say those things they deem legitimate "speech.")
I know you know this, but it is important to reiterate: language is power because language shapes thought, which, to a great degree, shapes a shared reality. We will only survive finding the humor in the situation, but there should be a cutting edge to our laugh. And we should start pointing out to them, as you so eloquently do, that we know what they are up to and we will not go along.
"... because language shapes thought, which, to a great degree, shapes a shared reality."
Yes. Thank you for this.
The bidenistas claim they weren't censoring anyone. Then it shouldn't matter to them if they are banned from doing so.
The judge NAMED NAMES in his injunction...
included secretaries and employees of those agencies. Huge implications for them and their "reputations".
The fact that he issued his order on his DAY OFF...the Fourth of July,
makes his decision that much sweeter!
While there are technological advances to be acknowledged which have simultaneously advanced both the dissemination and suppression of speech, and there are theoretical nuances to the methodologies employed, again we are the most sophisticated marketing/propaganda culture in history, these amount to relatively minor dissimilarities in the comparison of Soviet propaganda objectives and what we are currently experiencing. According to the Soviet propagandists and our own “misinformation specialists” (who seem to have popped up out of nowhere in the past few years...), there is only correct speech to advance party goals. Everything else is punishable. These are Commies. If it walks, talks, and acts like a Commie, it’s a Commie, not a “misinformation specialist”. It’s more acceptable to call them Socialists, but Commie is more accurate in contemptuous tone and exposing their true motivations. It’s all copy and paste for these numbskulls.
From Wikipedia:
“Propaganda in the Soviet Union was the practice of state-directed communication to promote class conflict, internationalism, the goals of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the party itself....
...The main Soviet censorship body, Glavlit, was employed not only to eliminate any undesirable printed materials but also "to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item."[1] Under Stalinism, deviation from the dictates of official propaganda was punished by execution and labor camps.[citation needed] Afterwards, such punitive measures were replaced by punitive psychiatry, prison, denial of work, and loss of citizenship. "Today a man only talks freely to his wife – at night, with the blankets pulled over his head," the writer Isaac Babel privately told a trusted friend.[2]
And:
“An important goal of Soviet propaganda was to create a New Soviet man. Schools and Communist youth organizations such as the Young Pioneers and Komsomol served to remove children from the "petit-bourgeois" family and indoctrinate the next generation into the "collective way of life". The idea that the upbringing of children was the concern of their parents was explicitly rejected.[5] One schooling theorist stated:
We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family... We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state – that is our task.[6]
Those born after the Russian Revolution were explicitly told that they were to build a utopia of brotherhood and justice, and to not be like their parents, but completely Red.[7] "Lenin's corners", "political shrines for the display of propaganda about the god-like founder of the Soviet state", were established in all schools.[6] Schools conducted marches, songs, and pledges of allegiance to Soviet leadership. One of the purposes was to instill in children the idea that they are involved in the world revolution, which is more important than any family ties. Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father to the secret police NKVD, was promoted as a great positive example.[6]
Teachers in economic and social sciences were particularly responsible for inculcating "unshakable" Marxist–Leninist views.[8] All teachers were prone to strictly follow the plan for educating children approved by the top for reasons of safety, which could cause serious problems dealing with social events that, having just happened, were not included in the plan.[9] Children of "socially alien" elements were often the target of abuse or expelled, in the name of class struggle.[10] Early in the regime, many teachers were drawn into Soviet plans for schooling because of a passion for literacy and numeracy, which the Soviets were attempting to spread.[11]”
Thank God that we still gave a few federal judges who are not ruling in Pravdaesque language and from an inverted Commie reality.
"We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family."
I don't understand -- what was Scott Wiener doing in the Soviet Union?
Getting his Stalin dashboard bobble head, of course. Stalin was remarkable because he killed everybody, including those who helped him with his most dastardly purges against anybody thought to be an enemy, even when they weren’t.
Hiroaki Kuromiya
The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007
My great aunt is the subject of one of the vignettes of murdered innocents.
Agree that "we are the most sophisticated marketing/propaganda culture in history". Technology has enabled us to disseminate more information. Much, much more information - faster, much faster, than ever before in human history. But that same technology, like virtually every other technological advance, has been weaponized. Used to attempt to gain some perceived advantage for one group of people over another.
Information is neither intrinsically "good" nor "bad". The uses to which that information may be put may, of course, be "good" nor "bad", depending on who is making the call. And currently, our governments, and their the sycophants, the legacy media, have decreed that any information that disagrees with the official narrative of the day is "bad". AKA "Mis", "mal", or "dis" information. Truth, observed reality, even mathematical precision are irrelevant. "Good or "bad" is ONLY measured against which ever "expert" is ascendant - now. At this instant.
Unfortunately, the narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths we began to put in charge of our indoctrination centres (formerly “schools”), over fifty years ago, chose to adopt the Soviet methodology illustrated in your Wiki excerpt. And we let them!
Commie methodology lifted wholesale.
"Being stupid" is now in the job description for journalists, apparently. At least those looking to work for the mainstream media.
Stupid, or compliant enough to fake it comfortably.
I quite honestly always have to take a moment when I see the title "disinformation expert" because I have to work at remembering that it doesn't mean (at least not intentionally on the part of those sporting it) a person who is an expert at disseminating lies, which then makes me confused about what they are trying to say.
It’s as if the police Homicide Bureau were in charge of committing the homicides.
It comes from compartmentalization of the brain. Speech goes in one folder and disinformation in another. Anything in the speech folder is good. Anything in the disinformation folder is bad. It's that simple. Reclassification has to be properly done with all of the paperwork in order.
Sort of like if you have a paper that says classified it doesn't matter if the information on it has been declassified by an original declassification authority it is still a classified piece of paper if that piece of paper isn't properly annotated by the guy who marks declassified papers as declassified.
“The injunction “carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech.” Imagine being stupid enough to say that out loud.” Oh my gosh! I was thinking the same thing when I read that. How stupid can you be? It’s like they don’t even WANT common sense. It is, after all, common.
And yet the people at the Times, and the people who read the Times, are supposedly the brightest minds on the planet.
That's certainly the story they tell themselves, the poor bastards.
Well they have probably injected the most luciferase and we know that some parts of the injection go to the brain so..ipso facto their brains are really bright under certain wavelengths of light
Ignorance is strength.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
They are using that book as a guide.