After a weekend bouncing back & forth between Fox & CNN it was easy to see that each network has their own pre-arranged gripe schedule.
CNN harps on anti-vaxxers(they're mostly Republicans), the "Insurrection"(hey, they're all Republicans), condemnations of Cuomo that looked more like strategy sessions for his defense team, CRT(anyone who questions it is misinformed &/or suffering loss of white privilege) and not much else.
Fox does CRT(crazy liberals & Marxists), anti-vaxxers(they're mostly minorities), the Border(crazy liberal Marxists did it all), Covid(it's all a crazy liberal Marxist wet dream) & not much else.
I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention. As long as they put the required number of minorities along with the occasional rainbow flag in their ads they instantly become "part of the solution. The "news" is, much like the dinosaurs, completely extinct, at least as far as TV news goes.
As I mentioned elsewhere I also watched Biden's Town Hall from 2 weeks ago. In among Joe's word pasta ramblings, he'd occasionally hit lucidity. At one lucid point, Joe was trying to illustrate how he was going to make corporate America "pay their fair share" because he had the experience that he gained in Delaware where "150 corporations...150 corporations...(let's repeat it one more time)150 corporations are incorporated." Of course they're incorporated there because Delaware doesn't make them "pay their fair share" or, more appropriately, pay anything at all. So Joe's example was illustrating the exact opposite of Joe's intended purpose. Yet Don Lemon, handsome teleprompter reader playing TV journalist that is, stood there nodding all po' faced and subservient as if Joe wasn't making a complete fool of himself.
Oh yeah, and the audience clapped.
This started me thinking about experiments I had read about where researchers were trying to discern if seeing is really believing or do we tend to see what what we believe we're going to see irregardless of what's actually there.
One experiment took place in a normal college classroom. A professor would be lecturing as normal and then a stranger would enter the classroom. The teacher & the man would argue & then the interloper would pull an object out and stab the teacher with it before running out of the room. The teacher stood up & revealed that it was all pantomime. He then asked the class to detail what they saw. I do believe that every witness said that the man had a knife. Of course he didn't. What did have was a banana. Yet no one noticed.
Nothing illustrates this idea more than the story of North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park. Park said she was mugged by 3 black women in Chicago. As the women tried to escape, Park grabbed the woman who had her wallet and began yelling for assistance. The black woman, much to her credit, began yelling, “You’re a racist! The color of my skin doesn’t make me a thief” as a crowd of white people gathered. The white folk prevented Park from calling the police & they also let the black woman escape. The white people then started calling Park a racist, one even going so far as pointing at Park and telling her child, “Look at that racist, that’s the problem we have.”
My point here is that it seems we've reached a weird cultural point where huge chunks of the country are so buried in their "belief systems" they can no longer discern reality. In other words, culturally, many of us can no longer see the fucking banana.
The people that run the world don't give a shit about ideology or political parties. They certainly don't give a shit about the dumb peasants who think those things do matter and waste their time taking sides and arguing.
John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, who owns beach front property (sea levels????), flew in his private jet (CO2 emissions????) to attend oppressed Obama's birthday party at his $15 million beach front property (sea levels????).
As a member of the resident peasantry of the state of the party, i was just humbled and proud to be able to kick in a small portion of my tax dollars to provide pay (and surely overtime) for the legion of state and environmental police required to provide security for the great man and his sophisticated, vaccinated guests. You non-residents, poor souls, only got to pay for the Secret Service.
We're screwed anyway. You are talking about Joe's piss stream right? Because I hear that the White House janitors are fed up & want the old boy diapered ASAP.
Nice points! That Yeonmi Park story really hits home.
I think the reality is that as long as we don’t acknowledge that there are some very serious psy-ops deployed against the general population, we’re not really getting to the heart of the issue when it comes to CRT and the “Woke” Cultural revolution.
The promotion of Wokeness, CRT, these are literally play by play the kinds of ideologies that are intentionally inserted into society in order to force its collapse.
Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector, referred to this as “ideological subversion” and outlined the four stages of how these subversion campaigns are implemented in a society or enemy regime, play by play:
“Make the cops look like corrupt pigs, make the criminals look like the good guys, undermine the spiritual and faith foundations of the society, promote other artificial cults and ideologies to replace their foundational principles, and yes, encourage people to study useless subjects and get useless degrees, discourage the study of practical and scientific work.”
That’s literally all mentioned in the first ten minutes or so of his presentation. And it’s literally play for play for Woke CRT stuff is promoting. Is it a coincidence?
No.
Fast forward to today’s Frankfurt School Frankenstein Woke generation, and it’s play for play, just like a former spy Yuri Bezmenov articulated decades ago. This is more MK-Ultra stuff than it is a misguided debate on equality and civil rights…
And it should not be contentious to say this stuff is easily spotted because it uses a formula. Whether it’s KGB 1980s cultural warfare or 21st century Five Eyes psy-ops, the basic formula for ideological subversion remains the same. The problem is they are now directing these weapons of war in the form of ideological warfare and psychological warfare against their own domestic populations, rather than just foreign adversaries.
So let’s please stop talking about CRT and Wokism like they are just another crazy idea and debate that’s gotten out of hand, which somehow just managed to penetrate the boardrooms of the most powerful corporations, the most established educational institutions and the corridors of the greatest government powers.
The way in which it has been able to spread at such a breath-taking rate is actually one of the biggest tip offs that there’s a well-coordinated ideological warfare operation, which is what intelligence agencies do… they run ideological warfare operations. The constant msm amplification of the same messages is just further evidence for something much more coordinated. As Caitlin Johnstone wrote not long ago, “The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media, Now it Is the Media.” Most of the messaging is just an extension of the intel narratives.
However, with that said, the whole art of these covert operations is really about making it seem like it’s all normal, like these are all just natural debates and ideas that have just come about on their own and made their way into the scripts of all the major highly controlled news networks in the world, entrenched academia etc…
The case of how Venice, a tiny little island in a lagoon, was able to run a global trade and financial empire is arguably one of the best examples for understanding how today’s modern ideological warfare functions, including how something like CRT is being used. With its intelligence services, Venice profiled all the dukes and princes and diplomats, figured out what everyone’s weaknesses, vices or vulnerabilities were, and when needed they would exploit them. They would promote those who espoused the ideologies they thought useful for maintaining the “republic” and supported them. So today people like Di Angelo and Kendi get book deals and they just think it’s because they must be doing something right. These types of people are just useful idiots.
Venetian intelligence used people’s blind religious and ideological beliefs to get people to fight and kill each other, and made the loans to the various armies and parties on various sides and watched them go at it.
Technically, if people really knew their history, they would be able to spot the kinds of ideological warfare campaigns we’re seeing today, and the kind of civil war and Jacobinism that it’s meant to create.
The same way Venice ran its empire is the same way the Modern Anglo-American financial establishment is able to maintain its control within the Western world. Most of those within the higher echelons of military, media, policy-making are actually some of the most brainwashed and ideologically blind individuals there are. They have been instructed and recruited in elite schools where a good deal of “talented” individuals are spotted and brought into the intelligence world.
What matters most for this kind of thing is spreading the right ideologies, creating the artificial debates and false binaries which end up herding people and getting the general population to tribalize and fight amongst itself, rather than pointing out that such ideological warfare is being deployed.
There are a million ways to make the same goal happen, CRT and the related Woke Revolution just happens to be the chosen method because it allows for a rewriting of American history and playing on historical injustices particular to America.
It’s no different than the Anglo-American intel networks’ “de-nazification” of Germany program run after WWII where Germans were essentially told that what happened happened because there was something innate inside them, something evil, and that unless they submitted themselves and took on the collective guilts of war criminals, and passed it on to the future generations, the same horrors would occur again, because of them. It was a means of completely castrating the population emotionally and intellectually using shame.
We see the same guilt and shame tactics being used today. It’s always the same formula. The predicates might change, the times and places may change, but the ideological subversion playbook remains essentially the same.
Didn't Brezhnev tell Reagan that the thing he liked best about America was its propaganda machine. I believe he went on to say that they had propaganda in Russia but nobody really believed it. Americans, on the other hand, bought their own propaganda completely?
It's always been surprising that Mk-Ultra is almost never discussed. It's mot like it didn't happen. It's not like lawsuits haven't been won against the government. The suit up in Canada comes to mind where Dr Cameron was doing some horrible, Mengele type, shit to innocent people.
His concept of, I believe, psychic driving, where he would take embarrassing snippets from patient's therapy sessions, such as I hate my father or mother or I want to fuck my father or mother and put them on endless tape loops fed to the patient in, I believe, a helmet they weren't allowed to remove. When people started
snapping & trying to escape, he'd dose them with a small amount of curare, paralyzing them for their journey to hell.
Women would go in with that entirely bullshit diagnosis called mild hysteria and come out incapable of holding their bowels or bladder. Many could no longer speak & had to be retaught.
All paid for with God fearing, Commie hating America's hard earned tax dollars.
There are historical reasons for why and how social engineering, behavior modification and other methods were developed with essentially scientific precision in the Western world. It's a bit of a long story for a comment section, but some of that history is discussed here:
In respect to CRT and the Woke cultural revolution, the great irony is that instead of feeding the fire and treating the ideas like they are just another set of beliefs or philosophical outlook, wouldn't we be having a very different discussion if we just simply pointed out that these ideas have all the characteristics of a psy-op, of ideological subversion, and are largely only an issue because they have been amplified by a mainstream media establishment, which is largely a psy-op controlled by intel agencies...
Is the problem not that most of the people who argue against CRT and the Woke revolution are themselves not very familiar with how psychological warfare works, and the degree to which Western society is saturated with such operations?
Ironically, there is very little that isn't actually a direct or indirect spin-off from some psy-op. Most of the fear around being caught espousing a "conspiracy theory" has to do with.... guess what.... a psy-op, with plenty of cognitive dissonance such that people have increasingly learned to police themselves. While some might think that sounds over the top, or just like crazy conspiracy theorizing, I'd simply say the following: just look at the way the ideas are actually spread, and look at how the messaging is framed. Forget the narratives and ostensible reasons for this or that idea, take a moment to carefully consider how the ideas are spread, how they are amplified, and how the messaging is actually designed around appealing to group think and arbitrary authority, and always crafted in a way that discourages any kind of nuanced argument or independent thinking. When we're dealing with ideological subversion, it's always going to follow that kind of formula. It's always the same: use fear and shame, create an enemy image, manipulate the group dynamic such that anyone who is caught saying the wrong thing is shamed and exposed to one of the ultimate primal fears: being expelled from the group.
In evolutionary terms, being expelled from the group or tribe was equivalent to a death sentence, the end of the road. So the manipulation of the group, and finding out how to channel and direct that group energy in order to use it to crush outliers and alternative viewpoints is all based on appealing to the most primal and unconscious instincts in human beings. In social engineering lingo, it's "nudging" people by appealing to "below board" automatic thinking, rather than "above board" conscious thinking. The method is always about shaming people and making them feel bad for not having the right views such that at a certain point, they stop thinking about whether a certain view is right or wrong, but more about the undesirable and uncomfortable effects of holding or sharing a given view. With that kind of very finely crafted cognitive dissonance, you don't have to tell people what to think or convince them, they essentially learn take up the behaviors that avoid the uncomfortable feelings and nonthreatening situations. And it's all done with just a solid set of well-conceived "nudges."
However, once we're aware that this kind of method is constantly being used, it becomes hard not to see it. Most of the msm messaging and narratives are framed and promoted in a way that always has that same effect of zeroing in on the vulnerabilities mentioned above.
To quote Bertrand Russell who mused about the coming applications of social engineering on a mass scale in the postwar period:
"Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.''
Russell continued, ``The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship....The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.''
And... ``Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.''
-The Impact of Science on Society, Bertrand Russell.
But why stop there? Russell also wrote:
"In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called `co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them."
-The Scientific Outlook, Bertrand Russell
What's the goal? It's obvious: remake Western civilization into the image the Brave New World social engineers and their oligarchical masters desire. But they can't have a utopian brave new world society with a systematic eugenics program and pagan Malthusian world religion (thinly disguised under the veil of "protecting the environment" and "saving the planet") without first eliminating the heritage of the European Renaissance and Western Judeo-Christian tradition.
To quote something Aldous Huxley said, as recounted by his collaborator, Dr. Timothy Leary, in his biographical account Flashback:
``These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.''
Leary then chimed in: ``We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.''
Enter: "lived experience" and the obsession with promoting the primacy of one's feelings over every other consideration, regardless of the effects on society as a whole. By framing everything in terms of feelings and "lived experience," you're guaranteed that no truthful ideas or principles will ever make it into the discussion. Everyone gets to just create their own reality. And now they have access to all the drugs, entertainment and sex they need to content themselves. Just imagine an entire young generation reared with this kind of outlook. Fascism will delivered directly to your door.
While saying the crazy Woke ideas are really just tools for a much broader and creepier agenda may sound weird, it's true. Just because it's weird or doesn't seem to fit the current narrative, doesn't mean it's not true. If people have a sense of the history of cultural warfare and psychological warfare in the Western world, and if they're not just stuck thinking in terms of new cycles and itty-bitty arcs of time, none of this should sound surprising.
If it does sound surprising, well, welcome to the Brave New World. The messaging was successful. That being said, I'm hopefully, I think a lot of people are waking up, and the oligarchs are banking on the idea that we're all just blank slates, that no fundamental axiomatic change can occur in the population without them sanctioning it. Their blindness may very well be of epic proportion.
"And it should not be contentious to say this stuff is easily spotted because it uses a formula. Whether it’s KGB 1980s cultural warfare or 21st century Five Eyes psy-ops, the basic formula for ideological subversion remains the same. The problem is they are now directing these weapons of war in the form of ideological warfare and psychological warfare against their own domestic populations, rather than just foreign adversaries."
And how EXACTLY does the alleged "KGB 1980s cultural warfare" equate with "21st century Five Eyes psy-ops", if I may inquire?
False equivalence of the crudest, most spectacular kind imaginable much, Monsieur David Gosselin?
The rest of your jaw-droppingly insidious comment is riddled with equally irrational multiple fallacies, enhanced by inappropriate comparisons and non-existent parallels.
May I ask, which educational establishment have you graduated from?
Incidentally, and if I may, Nabokov's advice to a budding critic of which you appear to be a prime example:
"My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message.
Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means, place the "how" above the "what", but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.
Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent."
More to the point:
Q.
"As a writer, have you ever found criticism
instructive - not so much the reviews of your own books, but
any general criticism? From your own experiences, do you think
that an academic and a literary career nourish one another?
Since many writers today know no other alternative than life
on campus, I'd be very interested in your feelings about this.
Do you think that your own work in America was at all shaped by
your being part of an academic community?"
A by Nabokov.
"I find criticism most instructive when an expert proves to
me that my facts or my grammar are wrong. An academic career is
especially helpful to writers in two ways: 1) easy access to
magnificent libraries and 2) long vacations. There is, of course
the business of teaching, but old professors have young
instructors to correct examination papers for them, and young
instructors, authors in their own right, are followed by
admiring glances along the corridors of Vanity-Hall. Otherwise,
our greatest rewards, such as the reverberations of our minds
in such minds as vibrate responsively in later years, force
novelist-teachers to nurse lucidity and honesty of style in
Machiavelli writes how if one wishes to tear someone else down, one must attack them for their virtues and not their vices, and sow the seeds of doubt; by doing this, you can reduce someone to nothing. If someone is brave, call them a coward. If they are honest, inform everyone of their deceit. You demonstrated this fairly well, by trying to ask someone who presents facts and cites the historical record as he makes connections to our present history how any of this actually "equates" or is connected, and by trying to put into doubt the education and qualifications of someone who gives a reader the impression of being educated and knowledgeable.
However, if you want your Machiavellianism to be successful, you need to work on your writing and try to be a bit more succinct. If you had omitted half of your post, it might have conveyed its message better, but as it is, it comes across as rambling, and doesn't work very well to discredit your opponent the way you hoped. It's a tough read, rather than an easy one like David Gosselin's fine posts, which are long and yet easy reading. The lack of coherently expressed meaning and ideas in your post unfortunately does more to discredit yourself than your opponent, who you try to criticise for their coherently expressed meaning and ideas. The difficulty in skimming your post and the excessive use of spacing, new lines, and quotes in it, could make one miss the more poetic lines, which could have aroused a reader's attention, like whatever you were writing about the "sudden erection of [David Gosselin's] small dorsal hairs." A fascinating Latinate description of goosebumps, despite it failing to convey an impression of being an educated, erudite literary critic, who is merely dispelling proletarian sophistry.
Unfortunately, I can only give you a C+ on this one, and I will have to forward your post and this review to your team leader at the DIA. I recommend rereading the works of Machiavelli, but before you do and risk getting caught up with how flowery his beautiful medieval Italian writing may sound, have a quick read of George Orwell's famous "Politics and the English Language" essay, if you would like to better avoid using words that will only convince the reader of the opposite of what you intend to; especially these days.
Hope that helps. If not, as far as I'm concerned, nothing ever will. Ta-ta for now!
Thank you for your outstandingly superior and shamelessly condescending reply of sorts to my comment, which was not addressed to you.
Needless to say, your blatantly intellectually dishonest rant attacking me for the crimes I never committed amounts to complete and utter nonsense of the crudest, most brazen kind imaginable.
I certainly intend to raise the issue of your unrestrained antisocial behaviour with the owner of this site, whom I admire tremendously.
It is apparent that you never actually read in full or indeed understood my reply to Monsieur David Gosselin.
The obvious questions are - do you seriously think that David Gosselin is unable to stand up or even speak for himself? How much is he paying you for trolling me, or do you operate voluntarily out of a burning desire to attack someone for the sake of projecting your own apparent insecurity (or moderate to severe mental health difficulties in strictly clinical terms) on innocent passers-by who in your not exceedingly sophisticated view couldn't or wouldn't dare to fight back?
Just out of curiosity, have you by any chance graduated from the same educational establishment as Monsieur David Gosselin, or did you study under his direction or willful misdirection it is most likely to be? Or perhaps you were or still are involved in a more personal relationship with your former professor/lecturer/tutor or personal mentor it might be?
Incidentally, I would not find it difficult to quote Machiavelli from memory after each and every sentence of your hapless little essay and in relation to a similarly confused "comment" of sorts that you are attempting to defend with such nothing short of outlandish and truly hilarious gusto.
As for the ever so ubiquitous George Orwell, it is common knowledge that he was the MOST shining example of brazenly extreme hypocrisy, unadulterated cynicism and blatant intellectual dishonesty Humanity has ever known.
Suffice to say that he shopped and grassed on his fellow writers, thinkers and intellectuals by their dozens, if not hundreds, to MI5, MI6 and various other affiliated British state security vermin who effectively controlled The Great British society at the time. Or perhaps Orwell's backstabbing background empowered you to have the audacity to be so openly abusive towards me?
Incidentally, Nabokov on Freudism:
"Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?
A. Have I been what?
Subjected to psychoanalytical examination.
A. Why, good God?
In order to see how it is done. Some critics have felt that your barbed comments about the fashionability of Freudianism, as practised by American analysts, suggest a contempt based upon familiarity.
A. Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too silly and disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke. Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick."
Hope that helps, if not - have a VERY nice day.
Contrary to the popular misconception, "the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick" usually do anyway.
Further introductory reading on the most common and likely causes of your significantly less than impressive diatribe directed at me, if I may:
"The suit up in Canada comes to mind where Dr Cameron was doing some horrible, Mengele type, shit to innocent people"
Still waiting on Marvel Studios' ALPHA FLIGHT movie. John Byrne and Bill Mantlo dug deep into this shit back in the '80s.
I really miss the days when mainstream superhero comic books from both Marvel and DC were tawdry and transgressive. The corporate masters were not paying close attention. Now it's all IP-driven CGI movies.
Jacob's Ladder is a favorite of mine that also dug into that cesspit. I also enjoy the deleted ending with the Lovecraftian critter digging through the ceiling.
I think Allen Dulles got many of his more freakish mind game ideas when he spent an extensive time hanging out with Carl Jung. Jung also had his shadow side.
Dulles & Kennedy butted heads.
Kennedy took a dirt nap.
I'm sure the two incidents aren't connected in any way, shape or form.
There is actually some great research on the Permindex international assassination bureaus and the Montreal connection, which is a continuation of the work DA Jim Garrison did with his “On the Trail of the Assassins.”
“In spite of that lack of full de-classification, enough evidence has been uncovered over the years, largely spearheaded by the pioneering work of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in Stone’s production) who led in the only jury trial investigating the true killers in 1966. Garrison’s work didn’t stop at the trial which uncovered mountains of inconsistencies in the “official narrative” of a lone gunman promoted by the very CIA which Kennedy openly threatened to “splinter into a thousand pieces and scatter into the wind” after firing Allan Dulles.
“Garrison’s investigation continued until his death in 1992 and his discoveries led directly to a Montreal-based international assassination bureau set up by MI6 during WWII named Permindex and steered by Louis Mortimer Bloomfield- a character whose life is kept a mystery as letters and personal writings remain classified in Canada’s National Archives, in spite of their legal mandate to be made public 20 years after his 1984 death.”
Here's ALPHA FLIGHT, corny but fantastic in a way that only 1960s-80s superhero comics can be: https://bit.ly/3CypEDz
I like Jim Hudson ("Guardian")'s echelonment of his subordinates into "reliable" Alpha Flight ("they've mostly got their own lives"), "questionable" Beta Flight ("some are learning"), and "I don't know what to do here" Gamma Flight ("What's going to happen to Gamma Flight?") Hudson himself is an introverted geophysicist who is extremely ill-suited to run a superhero team, but the Canadian government makes him do it anyway. (Spoiler: He is later assassinated by an energy corporation.)
Marvel/Disney+, please hire me to write a spec script. I don't understand why all of these mentally ill Canadian characters are not as popular as the Avengers or the X-Men.
[Comic Book Guy voice] ...and, to my point, Wolverine was originally in Alpha Flight. The Canadian government's Department H experimented on him and gave him his adamantium-laced skeleton and claws. There's a whole plotline in Claremont's '80s X-Men in which Alpha Flight invades the U.S. to abduct Wolverine from the X-Men (since he's Canadian government property) and they fight.
Anyway. I need to stop crapping up the comment section with irrelevant discussion of decades-old comic books (although one might make a tenuous argument that this fits into the "good people and bad people" theme of MT's article). Please don't encourage me further.
I just always thought it was funny that the Canadian government was one of the most evil organizations in the Marvel Universe; akin to HYDRA but more subtle.
"Make the cops look like corrupt pigs, make the criminals look like the good guys, undermine the spiritual and faith foundations of the society, promote .." It's frightening how fast this narrative has reared it's head. I was @ an 8 yr old's bdy party and a group of boys were running around playing "cops and robbers". Seems innocent enough until one younger boy (7ish) stopped to ask his Grandma "wait, the robbers are the good guys, right?". Unfortunately the grandma just said "well....." . It all feels so hopeless at times.
You accurately describe the way the system works, but I think you impute a level of intentionally in the ruling class that's rarely actually there. Not many people see, much less act on, the grand structure. Each person is chasing narrow self-interest, and has a narrow scope.
Once you see that the problem is the structure, not the actors, you see why revolutions fail. Eat the rich just leaves different rich people in place.
"....The promotion of Wokeness, CRT, these are literally play by play the kinds of ideologies that are intentionally inserted into society in order to force its collapse...."
Should read:
"The promotion of Wokeness, CRT, these are literally play by play the kinds of ideologies that are intentionally inserted into society in order to keep the Gosselin's of the world off the streets and occupied with manufacturing pseudo-profundities that can't be argued for or against or even properly understood insofar that they are the linguistic equivalents of creating the artificial debates and false binaries of the ideological subversion playbook that unless they submitted themselves and took on the collective guilts of war criminals people like Di Angelo and Kendi get book deals and they just think it’s because they must be doing something right, rather than pointing out that such ideological warfare is being deployed, it was a means of completely castrating the population emotionally and intellectually, with that said, the whole art of these covert operations is really about making it seem like it’s all normal, those within the higher echelons of military, media, policy-making are actually some of the most brainwashed and ideologically blind individuals there are like these are all just natural debates and ideas that have just come about on their own and made their way into the scripts of all the major highly controlled news networks in the world, entrenched academia etc…"
Internet guy-flies like you, Gosselin, are just as dependant on the strictures and structures of CRT-Woke bullshit as any tenured professor inside the nation's critical theory cat clubs and strip joints. Absent the CRT/Woke universe, you'd be relegated to composing villanelles in Old Norse on the sex lives of unicorn jockeys and leprechaun-eunuchs. Which is to say that you, too, are but a pole dancer at the Kendi-DeAngelo Adult Lounge. Perhaps not a headliner yet, but looking sexier and sexier with every "rewriting of American history." Mazel tov.
He lists the following points as means of undermining the foundations of the state:
“Make the cops look like corrupt pigs, make the criminals look like the good guys, undermine the spiritual traditions and faith foundations of the society, promote other artificial cults and ideologies to replace them, and yes, encourage people to study useless subjects and get useless degrees, discourage the study of practical and scientific work.”
That doesn’t sound familiar? Yuri outlined how it was literally his job to promote these ideas.
I could be wrong, but I think the continued suggestion that bat shit crazy ideas like CRT have just managed to miraculously penetrate the boardrooms of the largest corporations, the most established universities, and the corridors of the greatest government powers thanks to the intellectual prowess of a few academics is really that sound. How these kind of things are actually spread is definitely an interesting phenomenon.
How do you explain the constant amplification of these ideas by the main stream media? As Caitlin Johnstone recently wrote, “The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media, Now it Is the Media”:
“Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called "Bountygate" story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.
"One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed 'intelligence officials') say today that it was a CIA claim," Greenwald tweeted. "So media outlets - again - repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all."
This is just standard protocol for the MSM at this point. Much of the talking points are predestined. The talking heads and anchors are t actually smart enough the manage the kind of narrative war required. The MSM is simply an extension of the intel establishment’s propaganda infrastructure.
I would also recommend looking into “Project Mockingbird” and “MK-Ultra.” These were real CIA programs.
If we consider these and various other elements, I don’t think suggesting that CRT is part of a larger panoply of disinformation, ideological subversion and psychological warfare should really be that surprising. Maybe it’s not, but I don’t think discarding that possibility is necessarily correct. It could actually account for a lot of the craziness, and the seemingly master and artful way in which CRT has managed to insert itself into virtually every institution.
Regardless of what you think, I would recommend listening to Mr. Besmenov’s presentation because his job was to run ideological subversion. He had first hand experience, which most people don’t, naturally. People don’t have to agree, but they might want to hear about this stuff from people with first hand knowledge.
Intel agencies have been involved in this kind of psychological warfare for a long time. The only contention here is whether those tools are now directed at their domestic populations or not. If they are, I think the promotion of racial tensions and the destruction of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition using critical theory would be exhibit A. It would just mean that things really aren’t the way they appear at all.
The CIA has a long history of using culture as a means of subverting the minds of the population. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front that promoted Modernism and Abstract Impressionism throughout the post-war period.
As strange as that might sound, it’s true. But why would the CIA promote Modern Art? Sounds crazy doesn’t it?
Not if people understand how ideological subversion works.
Ben Norton over at the Grayzone did some great coverage of the Cold War culture wars in a presentation he did on the Frances Stonor Saunders book “The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.” The CIA supported many of the leading literary magazines including Salon, Encounter, Paris Review, the list goes on.
I’d argue that much of the culture we see today, film, cinema, literature, is largely artificial, stilted, and promoted for other reasons that what they are ostensibly supposed to do, namely entertain and cultivate the minds of the population.
Here’s the description for Ben Norton’s Moderate Rebels episode, How the CIA cultivates a fake left: From the cultural cold war to intersectional imperialism:
“Ben Norton was invited to give this talk about the fake left and imperialism. He discusses how the CIA's "woke" recruitment ad is not new; it is rooted in an "intersectional imperialist" history going back to the first cold war, in which the CIA poured money into cultivating anti-communist, pro-imperialist progressive groups, using fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and billionaire-funded foundations like Ford and Rockefeller.
Ben goes through the book "The Cultural Cold War," and talks about supposed "leftist" CIA assets like feminist leader Gloria Steinem and Trotskyite civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, then analyzes examples of astroturfed, Nonprofit Industrial Complex-backed pseudo-left campaigns in the US, Western Europe, and Latin America.”
"The CIA has a long history of using culture as a means of subverting the minds of the population. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front that promoted Modernism and Abstract Impressionism throughout the post-war period.
As strange as that might sound, it’s true. But why would the CIA promote Modern Art? Sounds crazy doesn’t it?"
The main thrust of that effort was directed as the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. As it happens, many of the foremost pioneers of those movements were Russian painters of the early 20th century who ended up being purged by Josef Stalin. It sounds to me as if you and Stalin are on the same page in that regard.
Martin Cruz Smith based a quite erudite and entertaining novel on that history, entitled Red Square. Good summer reading.
Really deep writing, bringing up a lot of connections that I managed to follow despite not having read Lolita (or any other Nabokov.) Nabokov has been recommended to me repeatedly over the years, but that review is prompting me to actually get around to reading something by him.
"It’s no different than the Anglo-American intel networks’ “de-nazification” of Germany program run after WWII where Germans were essentially told that what happened happened because there was something innate inside them, something evil, and that unless they submitted themselves and took on the collective guilts of war criminals, and passed it on to the future generations, the same horrors would occur again, because of them. It was a means of completely castrating the population emotionally and intellectually using shame."
That's nonsensical. Do the Germans of today appear emotionally and intellectually "completely castrated" to you? Or do you just not like the fact that they're no longer so carried away by a sense of nationalism that they feel compelled to reify it as biological racial 'Aryan supremacy'?
You're upset that the Germans ended up suffering terribly from a war was started by a sociopathic leader who was supported by the vast majority of the German population at the time of the war's outset?
De-Nazification was a lot less punitive than a lot of other terms of surrender imposed by victors in other conflicts. In the material sense, it was certainly less punitive than the Treaty of Versailles imposed after World War One. "De-Nazification" didn't stop Reinhard Gehlen from serving as director of the BND, or Franz Josef Strauss from serving as Defense Minister, or Kurt Kiesinger from serving as Chancellor.
If you want to talk about Germany, I suggest you read the latest pieces by CJ Hopkins, who is based in Germany.
To quote something from his latest piece:
“My name is CJ Hopkins. I live in Germany. I am banned from eating at restaurants, travelling by plane or train, attending religious ceremonies, school, cultural events, and otherwise participating in society, because I refuse to convert to the official new ideology. #NewNormal”
Sound to you like a society that remembers its history, or one where most people are afraid to be caught saying the wrong thing, and instead just go along to get along?
And for the record, the Nazi war machine was made possible by Anglo-American financiers who played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power. When Hitler’s party was going bankrupt in the early thirties, and also already contemplating suicide, he was bailed out by a loan made by Prescott Bush, George Bush Jr.’s grandfather through Brown Brothers Harriman.
Hitler modelled his eugenics program on the US sterilization policies, which were pushed by much of the Wall Street elite.
There is also a book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. The Anglo-American intelligence and financial establishment is what actually made Hitler possible. The approach is always to support and prop up the kind of insane puppets who is not afraid to do the unthinkable. That was why Hitler became their guy.
In fact, there was an attempt to run a fascist coup in the USA to establish the same kind of dictatorship. The plot was exposed and foiled by General Smedley Butler.
Hitler had the backing of the Bank of England, the Bank of International settlements, and much of both the British and American financial establishment.
Those same financial networks exist still to this day.
Yeah, well one person's long winded is another reader's fascinating piece. So there. Great comment, esp your ending 'no longer see the fucking banana'. In the spirit of A Christmas Story: A++++++++++++++++....
Thanks. I actually wanted to use Obama's birthday bash as an illustration but I self censored because equating Barack & bananas might be...ahem...seen as racist.
Because Obama, with 9000 drone strikes and an estimated 80% killing innocent bystanders rate, probably makes him the most prolific serial killer in American history. His bragging self own of his murder skills pushes him firmly into sociopath territory. Then when you add in his 8 years of banker blow jobs & hand jobs you have a president who is about as left as my right hand.
Yet arch lefty, antiwar blather spewer and hater of Republicans, Eddie Vedder & his band, was originally scheduled to offer up a rocking Happy Birthday for Henry Lee Obama, only bowing out when the bash was scaled back.
Pearl Jam's website lists their Vitalogy Foundation's aims as, "Vitalogy elevates the voices of overlooked groups and seeks opportunities to support approaches that value people’s minds, bodies, and souls." I wonder if the act of violently turning folk's minds & bodies into souls also counts. Evidently it does.
No doubt that other arch lefty, antiwar blather spewer and hater of Republicans, Bruce Cringesteen was also in attendance since Henry Lee & Cringesteen are about to publish a book they co-authored.
Obviously Vedder & Cringesteen can't see the fucking banana either.
I wrote a critique of that party on my sub. Most views I've had yet. And I've gotten some of my first condemnation from leftists. Lol. Whatever. The satirical comment on the post is not one of them. He's a friend.
Now? CGI fakery "epics" with no plot line that could offend anyone in most of the world's movie market like some kind of everyflavor ice cream. Corporate partnerships have closed out anything not desirable.
I saw the Piper bio on A&E a few weeks ago. Do you remember Piper's ubiquitous leather jackets? They were kevlar lined because fans tried to kill him. He'd been stabbed a few times. Once fairly seriously. He was rushed to the hospital by Sgt. Slaughter.
I think most of the New Age can be attributed to intelligence agencies. Take a place like Findhorn, that was founded by Eileen Caddy. Caddy, who had said she was hearing an inner voice, was groomed by British Intelligence, long considered a valuable intelligence partner of the US, when she was isolated by her second husband, Peter Caddy, at the Scottish island of Mull.
This from Quest magazine:
"Eileen was subjected to what appears to be nothing other than a classical (Chinese/Korean-type) brainwashing procedure -- isolation, sleep deprivation, prolonged maintenance of painful positions, ego-devastating disparagement, etc. -- and was possibly given drugs as well.
This followed a previous, aborted, less intense episode which culminated in a suicide attempt by Eileen. Before the second, more intense procedure was performed Eileen refused to believe the “voice” was God apparently because her upbringing was strictly Protestant. Afterwards she accepted it.
The British military psychologists were at that time beginning to write the book on an infant field of research: personality testing and assessment. Whether Eileen scored high on tests or whether her husband just wanted to dump her is unknown. Also, before her first marriage, she and her brothers had run an inn catering to the RAF -- so she was a known entity.
In any event it appears that she was picked for some reason, and then RAF Officer, Peter Caddy, procured and developed her, exploiting her marital dissatisfaction. And it was not long (1954) until she was beginning to hear an inter-cerebral “voice” which identified itself as “God.”
Peter encouraged her to listen and accept by regaling her with tales of his own purported spiritual contact years earlier in Jerusalem, when a “voice” -- so he claimed -- had spoken to him."
There are also more current iterations that stink of intelligence operations.
You have faith healer John of God in Brazil. Oprah featured him. She said that when she met him she almost fainted. Said her visit to his compound humbled her. After her blessing John of God's popularity, already quite large, became even larger.
Currently there are 600 allegations of rape against him. There are also accusations that he was spiriting young girls away to secluded "baby farms" where he would impregnate them. When the baby was born he'd sell it on the international market.
Also Waco is back in the game with Robert Chipman's nomination to head the ATF and the fact that another religious cult of dubious provenance has taken up residence there.
A cult, formerly known as World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, but now known as the Rod of Iron Ministries. has made the AR-15 the centerpiece of their beliefs.
It is an offshoot of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church headed by one of Moon's sons. Moon has an extensive history working with US intelligence. His sons church has embraced Trump in a big way.
Oh Spiderbaby you said a mouthful there. They don't care about the majority of Syrians or the worst refugee crisis in history which nearly destabilized Europe -- and funding AQ and ISIS who don't even take POWs (let's face it, even the Nazis had POW camps). And the present admin sort of seems to start in the same old direction on that particular foreign policy.
I think that Joe Bob sent a heavily armed convoy into Syria on Inauguration Day.
I also seem to remember hearing a snippet of leaked audio from an investor's meeting that occurred right after Trump announced that he wanted to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan. The man speaking was reassuring the investors that they shouldn't worry because there would always be a war somewhere.
Nuland was recently questioned on Capitol Hill. When it came to Erdogan arming Turkmen extremists (you know, like the jihadists he sent to Armenia recently to "help" Azerbaijan along with his drones), "Well, they can do a service by pushing back on Assad ... " oh yeah, big service to the world, got it.
We just had the Captive Nations Week Summit in July, sponsored by the Victims Of Communism Memorial Foundation. The VOC, like Captive Nations Week itself, is closely connected to the infamous World Anti-Communist League (WACL), an endlessly fascinating netherworld of diehard fascists, international gangsters, and "former" intelligence and military officers the world over.
The attendees were the usual suspects of Neo-cons, Neo-libs, spooks, spies, strippers & fan dancers. Okay, the last two groups weren't there, but they should have been.
Despite the fact that an unrepentant Nazi collaborator was instrumental in crafting the Captive Nations Week that this event was celebrating, President Joe Biden had few qualms about endorsing it. Indeed, everyone in attendance got a commemorative letter from the president honoring the event.
One of my favorite attendees was Rushan Abbas. Abbas is a Uyghur American activist, and one of the foremost critics of the Uyghur genocide allegedly being carried out in China. I say allegedly, as claims of genocide there are highly controversial, to put it mildly. In fact, the VOC has been at the forefront of pushing these claims.
Coincidentally Abbas also served as a translator during the interrogation of Uyghur men held at Guantanamo Bay, which makes me wonder who side she is on, if there are even anything as quaint as "sides" anymore.
Oddly enough, whether an attendee was Democrat or Republican, Neo-Con or Neo-Lib, they all agreed on regime change for Cuba, Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran & Syria. In fact, the only real difference between them on these matters is the extent to which LGBTQ+ rights should be emphasized when regime change is advocated.
It appears that America's upper management is in complete goose-step...ooops...I mean lockstep while the lower echelons like us are kept at each others throats. Weird, huh?
To paraphrase George Carlin, it is indeed one big club and we ain't in it.
"Obama, with 9000 drone strikes and an estimated 80% killing innocent bystanders rate, probably makes him the most prolific serial killer in American history. His bragging self own of his murder skills pushes him firmly into sociopath territory."
I always wondered exactly who Bad Religion were targeting with this song. Maybe it was prophetic.
Thanks for the video. I used to like Bad Religion. Since everything switched to Spotify and my local radio station's playlist stopped progressing passed 1995 or so, I don't hear a lot of new music unless I specifically hunt for it.
Sadly there are far too many candidates that fit that song's title.
In my opinion BR tapered off badly (ha) c. 2000, but from about 1988-95 they were at the height of their powers. I especially like "(You Are) The Government" and "American Jesus" -- bookends of the classic era.
It doesn't help when this happens: A and B argue. B leaves. A finds and talks to a policeman.
And the media writes: A and B argued. They went to a policeman and told him they had argued with a man who had since left.
WTF? Was there a C who was with A? Did A and B argue with C?
That's journalism in the brave new world of "they" replacing "he" and "she." And that's a real example I read just this past weekend. I'll be damned if I understand how the public can be expected to know the "preferred pronouns" of everyone who might appear in a newspaper article.
This is my objection to using "they" for the singular gender-not-specified: it causes needless confusion. There are a number of concocted words proposed for the purpose - I just saw "herm" used. One was really funny, but I've forgotten it.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to introduce a completely new word, so apparently, for now, we're going down the easy path. A note: any writer who leaves the confusion standing is incompetent, and so is "their" editor.
Aha - I remembered the funny one: it was in Klingon, hence guttural and unpronounceable. But anything short would do. There are languages that do have the missing pronouns; maybe we could thank them nicely and appropriate one.
That's a great point: "I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention."
That's why the Amazon etc.. funding for BLM and Antifa is such a smart money.
"I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention. As long as they put the required number of minorities along with the occasional rainbow flag in their ads they instantly become "part of the solution. The news is, much like the dinosaurs, completely extinct, at least as far as TV news goes."
You don't need a lab full of assistants and apparati: "researchers were trying to discern if seeing is really believing or do we tend to see what what we believe we're going to see irregardless of what's actually there."
You can get some interesting results all by your lonesome, as Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by just watching". See "Cornflake" at
At my weekend job there was a male nurse who I used to chat to regularly. He was an avowed Republican. I wasn't. We regularly talked politics. We never got in a fist fight, attempted to murder each other or cancel each other. He changed my mind on some things. I changed his mind. Y'know like adults.
He was always outspoken about the problematic nature of masks. Didn't get the vaccine. Criticized my employer's entirely inane response to Covid.
Then one day, due to a family emergency, he left 15 minutes early without asking permission. He was terminated.
Now, as context, you have to understand that the facility is egregiously short staffed. Nurses violate rules constantly. Rarely receiving a reprimand.
For example, his replacement is a totally unhinged liberal woman who has repeatedly given clients the wrong meds, caused conflict & unrest in every assignment she's had and, more importantly, uses enemas on the clients to annoy staff she doesn't like. In other words, she unnecessarily shoves an enema tube up a mentally challenged client's ass as a demented form of revenge porn. One nurse described her as a Shit Nazi. Yet she has been there for 8 years.
There is no sane explanation for this dichotomy.
Oh yeah, she is an outspoken hater of Republicans. If she gets even a whiff of the Republican about staff, she shrieks insanely at them.
I know this because once I found out the details of her insanity, I borrowed a MAGA hat off of a friend and I wear it every weekend. I also make sure FOX is on whenever she's in the building. She goes ballistic, sputtering inane nonsense like it was pearls of wisdom. I smile & wave. She quickly exits the building in a huff. I chuckle to myself.
I figure that it's the least I can do for my canned friend.
I also figure that I'm not far away from being tarred with some invented allegation which is why I keep a small digital recorder in my pocket, only turning it on when crazy girl is in the house. At the very least I'll be able to shove my employer's hypocrisy in their face. Right before they can me. Time will tell.
No. My internet presence, other than here, is zero.
I had one years ago. The only useful fact I learned was whenever I'd post a photo of a hot girl in a bikini or totally nude, I'd get a shit load of hits from Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Make of that what you will.
The time for polite discourse and problem solving is long past. We'll see people fighting it out soon enough as it all comes crashing down.
Know what? Who cares?
What's a bunch of barbarism compared to this thinly veiled version of the same?
One could argue that we're already IN the next Dark Age... the one Sagan warned us all about. Reason was abandoned long ago, and it's all witch hunts and lynching's nowadays.
*Wonderfully well written ! Yes. I was apparently in college about the same time that you were. Back when scientists were discovering and *proving the fact that eye-witness accounts of *anything (especially anything involving emotion/trauma) were more often than not, *worthless for just the reason you have noted above.
Eye-witness accounts, long the "gold standard" of proof in Courts, we now know to be
the fabric of the human brain almost always "seeing" what it *expects to see, mostly according to the context of the experience.
People in jobs with backgrounds as trained observers do better than the general public at large, but even they cannot fully escape the way the human brain is wired to work.
I’ve listened to Yeonmi Park on JBP and JRE podcasts and something about her story just doesn’t feel right. I could be completely mistaken but my gut tells me it’s bs/exaggerated. I’m referring to her defection adventure not the mugging which I can unfortunately totally believe.
Doing zero research on it because I'm supposed to be trying to get work done, I think that she's changed the mugging story, and that her story contradicted what the cops recorded. She should avoid embellishing, if she wants to be credible.
I too listened to those podcasts and was skeptical of her defection story. But then I recalled all the stories we have heard from survivors of the holocaust -- the death marches barefoot through the snow, the escapes from the camps, just plain survival in circumstances where one should not have survived -- and I give Ms. Park the benefit of the doubt. I only doubted her story because it was incredible. (Also see, the Witold Pilecki report.)
Can't comment on the defection story since I only saw the snippet describing the mugging. If I get the time I'll give the whole episode a listen. Maybe it's all invented bullshit & I'm the idiot who can't see the banana.
Since I'm bored & stuck waiting for my kid to wake up & help cut up a tree that didn't survive last night's storms, I will give you 32 hours of my weekend TV offerings in a nutshell. No need to thank me.
We'll start with movies.
One station played the 1st six Star Wars movies except they played them out of order. Sadly they're owned by Disney & fuck Disney so I don't partake.
Then the TV offered the 1st four Jaws movies except they played them backwards, 4 to 1, so the viewer could watch Sheriff Brody rise from the dead like a good ol' zombie shark hunter.
Lifetime had a series of Psycho movies. Oh, not the Hitchcock Psycho franchise just a series of movies with Psycho in the title. For example, Psycho Stripper & Psycho Gardner & Psycho Gynecologist. Good stuff if good actually means insipid.
The TV also offered up the Bourne films, skipping #1. I think it was still out partying in Cabo. They followed that with the John Wick franchise, also skipping #1. I'm sensing a pattern.
Another station offered up every Sharknado film. Sadly I've seen them all at least once. Don't judge. It's my burden.
That leaves us with actual TV shows. Let's see we had Blue Bloods. What can one say about Tom Selleck other than he has the emotional range of a large Winnebago. Luckily, these days, he looks like a large Winnebago. Seriously, Tom is amazing. What's amazing is how he's older than dirt yet there's not one gray hair in that oversized melon head of his. I picture a retinue of his handlers treating his head like a large pen nib as they invert Tom & dip his whole head into a melon sized dye-well. Using putty knives to scrape off the excess.
What is exactly is up with Commissioner Stormtrooper anyway? His kids are so psychologically beaten down & under his thumb they have to crawl back home every weekend for dinner. A dinner where the Commish & his Pops sit like demented Gremlins at either end of the table dispensing cop wisdom like dysfunctional oracles.
The only believable part is the father/son bond between Selleck & Wahlberg. It's believable primarily because Wahlberg has the emotional range of a large toaster oven so I could see them as being related.
Then we have the many Law & Order iterations. The less said about them the better.
We had NCIS in 2 versions. All I wonder when I watch any of them is how the Navy can keep putting ships to sea with all the dead & incarcerated sailors generated by the 3 iterations of this turkey.
Seinfeld was playing in a block but the only thing I wonder when watching Jerry is how brain damaged I had to be in the 90s to find him funny. These days it's just painful viewing.
Two & A Half Men was on but they were the Ashton Kushman version that is about as funny as an unexpected bowel movement on a street corner.
Big Bang Theory was also offered. That's the show where tiny elf sized scientists, who could apparently be beaten senseless by your average kindergarten student, show their plucky spunk as they maneuver the hot chicks into position for a good, emotionally fragile, dicking. It's about as funny as a yeast infection.
Then we had sports. I did spend 20 minutes watching something called Cornholing that involved 4 fat guys, some bean bags & an inclined board with a hole in it. You could call these guys athletes in the same sense you could call someone who did a keg stand & then passed out in a pile of dog shit an "athlete."
I won't detail the endless stream of annoyingly unfunny Madison Ave. ads that play between this wonderland of entertainment...ummm...wonder. Strangely none of them make me want to shop as much they make me want to hurl my work boot at the screen. Although I am hoping to see the Geico ad where the put upon and belittled guy snaps with a hand axe as he screams at Flo, "Bundle this you fucking bitch. Bundle this." I might give that a few views.
Oh yeah, I really do occasionally watch Iyania: Fix My Life. The old broad thinks she's Yoda. Quite amusing. It's also quite amusing how all the women are told they're queens(queens of what is never actually explained) while the young black men are forced to crawl through tubes(birth canal proxies?) as they recite all the ways they let the women in their life down. Great stuff if, by "great stuff," you mean bullshit masquerading as wisdom.
So there you go. A weekend of TV enjoyment for all. I probably left some out but my kid's done with his pancakes & I'm off to do some chainsawing.
It’s baseball season, dude! Turn on a game. The best thing about baseball (other than my Dodgers) is that, as long as one team is getting hits and putting runners on base, there are no commercial breaks. You can go 20, 25, 30 minutes with no ads. And even when there are breaks, they’re really short, just because there isn’t much time between innings.
Buddy, 16 hours in a silent room with just me, myself & I can get a bit...weird sometimes. I used to always bring a book but I got old & reading glasses are a pain to carry around. I've had pairs broken by clients having a bad day & needing someone to take it out on.
Actually this was just one weekend that I happened to spend a lot of time watching TV news. Call it comparison shopping. Neither side won my viewing dollars.
In the past, I probably would have just clicked on a ball game. That ended with the cardboard cutouts of people in the stands & the piped in fake crowd noise. Too much like a bad acid trip. Plus they've literally politicized every form of entertainment that folk would use to escape politics & the world. So sorry, I don't do sports anymore. Although, should they send me a check every month, I'd be more than happy to cheer along with everyone else.
I suppose I could also have watched the Olympics except that I don't care.
While everything up there was actually airing this passed weekend, I only typed it up because I'm an asshole. And I was bored.
As it looks now I will have other things to worry about other than TV viewing. One of our business's main clients informed my wife earlier that they haven't weathered the lockdowns very well. They're giving it till the end of the year to see if it turns around but they may close. That would be a significant income hit. Now, with talks of the return of harsher anti-Covid measures, the closing seems inevitable. Pre-lockdown the company was expanding as was our income. Add in the iffy nature of my weekend job & I foresee stress on the horizon. Weeeeeeeeee!! I suppose there's always heroin. Then again, Hunter S. once said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional,” so maybe I'll start a second career as the world's oldest social media influencer and champion of pronoun integrity.
Okay, well, there’s real fans in the stands now and no piped-in crowd noise, so your bad acid trip is over. As far as politics in baseball is concerned, the only political thing I’ve noticed is last August or September, when Orel Hershiser made a “We need law and order” comment during a Dodgers broadcast. Baseball’s about as apolitical as you can get.
I mean, honestly, I don’t give a fuck what you do. But if watching television was as hellish an experience for me as it sounds like it is for you, I’d just turn it off and crank some tunes or something. I’ll never understand this apparent compulsion of people to be super-pissed off about something that’s as easily remedied as just turning off the tv or getting off of social media or whatever. Simple solutions to easy problems really do exist.
e., I'm sorry it is none of that to me. It is Dr. Phil in blackface. It is attention seeking at its basest. These are conversations that should be private between therapist & client but instead are just another way that attention starved narcissists wallow in their own shit for attention on national TV.
At work. Worst cable package imaginable. Stations play same movies every freaking weekend. I tried to watch Iyania: Fix My Life but my eye's started to bleed. I actually only spent sections of the weekend bouncing. Some sections were spent moonwalking between CNN & FOX while other sections were spent ricocheting between CNN & FOX.
Then again maybe I'm a masochist & my hair shirt was in the laundry.
Great article again, Matt. One thing about Cuomo that should be mentioned is while groping a woman's breast at work is bad, launching a smear campaign against her when she complains reaches the true evil category.
Matt makes a good point about the moral failures we choose to focus on.
Cuomo's sex scandal is unsavory, but doesn't approach the sinister criminality of knowingly forcing retirement homes to accept Covid positive patients, writing a waiver for the companies doing this so they would not be held liable, lying about the number of people this policy killed, then writing a book about how you beat Covid-19. It's almost comical it's so sinister.
Likewise, in Biden's 48 years in the Senate not only is he directly responsible for promoting endless war, growing the surveillance state and a primary architect of mass incarceration in the US, but also had a history of supporting laws like the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) that shifted all the burden from the lender to the borrower. All this and we hear about Tara Read.
I don't mean to minimize their poor behavior towards women, but it's like singling out Mussolini for his parking tickets while in office. Our society seems more offended by words than deeds and offending people has become a worse crime than actually killing them.
It's not just Biden and Cuomo who have a lot in common. Those who focus on the performative over the criminal have a lot on common as well.
The significant difference is that a sex abuse or similar allegation can, usually, be contained to the individual. If people started looking at Cuomo's COVID policies there are a string of other Governors (D) that implemented similar policies, as well as questions to be raised about why his staff didn't object. Focusing on sex abuse is a way of containing the damage.
I know. That's an important part of the context of this. But my comment about Biden goes to the question of why Cuomo and why now? Cuomo's behavior is in every way, including all those mentioned, are normal. So what's going on? Why did the party decide to get rid of him and launch the investigation?
Just a guess here. Al Franken got tko'd not because of one photo or accuser, but all of the others who came out of the woodwork. As well as the fact that some Dems were afraid that there were more on deck.
The Dems were already all in with Biden. But it seemed that there was only one accuser. And she was a bit dodgy, and a Bernie supporter (as am I), so they had cover.
Cuomo has a lot of accusers. The hypocricy of the Dems hits limits when it comes to losing a major seat. Whether that would be the NY governor's office, or potus.
Once accuser came forwards in defiance of the party, knowing what would happen. If an investigation against Biden had been conducted with suitable protection for accusers, I think there would have been plenty. He has a rep.
But anyway, my point is that it seems likely the party decided to ditch Cuomo for other reasons and used these scandals to do it (idk why or why now). And I think that even further devalues the cause of the millions of people who have to put up with creeps, bullies, gropers, quid-pro-quoers etc. at work.
I honestly have no idea about Biden. There are certainly enough creepy pictures of him on the interwebs. Do i think he's a pedo? Actually, i don't, but who knows. Do i think he has a major boundary issue. You betcha. Which is majorly problematic. But while unwanted hair sniffing and shoulder rubs are gross, it's still a ways from boob grabbing.
They could afford to throw him under the bus, they had a Dem governor to pick his replacement. Guy had presidential ambitions too, but wasn't going to be annointed. Ultimately no great loss.
My guess would be to look to the NY AG's office to see if there's a beef. I don't see a benefit to "the party", i.e . ruling class as a whole, that would be a reason to push this now.
The progressive wing of the Dem party has always hated the machine wing. And as that machine wing pulled all hands on deck to get rid of Trump, they are now paying the piper, in that all of those progressives who were put in office are now looking for blood and to advance the progressive agenda.
As Matt points out, there are only a couple of semi-serious allegations here, most fall into the same category that the allegations against Trump fell, unsubstantiated BS. But there is blood in the water, and you never let a crisis go to waste.
Don't stop to think that Cuomo, if his reputation is left (ahem) unmolested, would be a potential candidate for 2024, and the party knows it. They want to clear the deck now.
If Trump is riding a wave of MAGA again, and Joe has more than one piece of breakfast on his face... the Dems will need an alpha male to slug it out with the Donald. Cuomo is one of the few with the (D) next to his name who could dish it out as well as take it.
Focusing on the performative is by design - doing it on the criminal part would necessarily start conversation not about the failings of particular human but the failings and injustices of the system as a whole.
Areslent - Your commentary is excellent. It is by design -how else could it be that a crime is no longer a crime, and a non-crime is a crime ? People entertain insane rationalizations all day long, and therefor no longer have plain common sense. My 5$ is about to run out, but I am glad to find people like yourself posting here. These are not matters of entertainment, and we do not need/want gate keepers.
many are starting to see that these are matters of objective fact and morality - and beginning to realize it is not about being on one side or another. Bless you.
As a Leftist, my wake-up call about the duplicity of Dems occurred back in 1994 when "esteemed" Rep. Pat Schroeder repeated Jim Carville's line about "waving a dollar bill through a trailer park" after Paula Jones came forward with her accusation. Certainly as obscene as many things Republicans have been crucified for.
I tried to explain to many Democratic friends - not stupid people at all, otherwise pretty smart ones - back in '16 about how nauseatingly hypocritical it was for Hillary Clinton to say "believe all women" about Donald Trump, but not about her husband. They just couldn't make that connection, or understand that it was the exact same energy. At that point i really totally despaired of the ability for critical thinking of our Democratic electorate. If they had admitted - yeah, but Trump, so she gets a pass on Bill here - i could have at least mustered a scintilla of respect.
Ya know, now that I'm in my 60's I find myself, out of necessity, "taking a wide stance" to urinate (Prostate troubles). Makes me think back on that accusation with a bit of rueful understanding, or at least that it wasn't entirely a silly defence.
Thank you !! There are also bipartisan taboo themes though.
Much reported, including Ed Snowden "Topic of this year – Pegasus, etc.", is disclosure of continuous over time surveillance ability of all smart-phones of all conversations and pin-point location-accuracy even when phone is turned off.
Therefore, certainly many governments (certainly of Israel and the US) know EXACTLY and for ALL Epstein's associates and "guests" -- who, when, where, how long, and why they were with pedophile Epstein !! Yet we still don't know, after all this time, for example, even what Epstein's multiple passports show.
As courageous Eric Weinstein stated -- Epstein was "a construct" - by one or more intelligence services. And – the buck for these spywares for authoritarian governments stops -- at Israel apartheid government.
No, man, phone possession isn't like being physically microchipped.
If street drug dealers know how to use burner phones, and most people with a subscription to Wired magazine know what a Faraday cage is, it's easy to figure out that if someone really NEEDS to go out of the loop of being physically tracked by the phone(s) associated with their personal ownership, there are ways to effectively confound that sort of remote surveillance.
Since i brought up physical microchipping: it's a much more difficult proposition than the ignorant assume; the notion of "GPS nanochips" infused into the human circulatory system without prompting a stroke or an immune reaction- or operating without a power supply- is Spec-Fi at its worst. Look up the Inverse Square Law; there's no way around it. Without a sufficiently ample power supply for the transmitter chip, you got nothing. No grid can pick up the signal, not even 5G. Whatever the legit objections to 5G might be, humans being bugged by "nanochips" is not one of them. The power supply is the sticking point for all sorts of technologies, because Moore's Law does not apply to it. Moore's "Law" (not really a law) is a shorthand way of describing the exponential advances in the sophistication of digital technology- but that's entirely about switching transistors. Not power transistors, or any other sort of power supply. There's no way to shrink power supplies, storage capacitors, and power transistors down to the size of a grain of salt. Not now, not on the horizon. I mean, never say never; but I think science will unlock the mysteries of antigravity and nuclear fusion before Moore's Law applies to electrical power generation and storage.
There are of course microchips being used to identify pets- one of them is branded as the "NanoCHIP", despite the fact that it's fairly large in comparison to true nanochip technology; the NanoCHIP is about the size of a grain of rice. It's implanted subdermally or subcutaneously, under the surface of the skin, not in the circulatory system. Pet microchips provide identification only, in response to being wanded by a receiver; they are not tracking devices.
around 1991? I would agree. But 30 yrs later they are still respected leaders of the establishment. Should make us think on what our leader class really is.
Factcheck? LOL. Even if you trust this political propaganda site, there are lightyears of difference between off-hand unspecified counterclaims & the leaking of confidential damaging documents. You seriously can't see that?
One day Matt will realize that the reason The Woke confuse him so much and why Nabokov, Humbert and Lolita have not been canceled is that The Woke are villains. They identify with the evil, the destruction of innocence and the exertion of power. He's still thill thinking of them as misguided silly people, which of course many of them are, but the core group that drives them and guides their thinking and actions are neither silly nor misguided. They are intentional and self-aware in their corrosiveness. These type of people are not some new species. They have always existed in some place or position of power, reveling in the pain and suffering and collapse they cause. Torquemada would understand Humbert perfectly.
Too simple. Their model is not Torquemada, but Calvin. They have rediscovered original sin, and even total depravity. But it is limited to white folks, or more accurately people not on the official victim list. The issiues are deep, and even the religious among us seem to have lost the ability to think about them intelligently.
I don't entirely disagree though I think the same type of person and psychopathology is behind both. What makes them so slippery is that the details hardly matter. It doesn't really matter who is victimized as long as someone is victimized and made to suffer. It's sadism, essentially. The various ideologies and groups and victims are completely interchangeable and utilitarian. What is currently happening, IMO is that the technology of the internet has done what it does and allowed small groups of people to find others like them and network and band together to gain influence. It's a "community" of sadists.
"What is currently happening, IMO is that the technology of the internet has done what it does and allowed small groups of people to find others like them and network and band together to gain influence. It's a "community" of sadists."
My brother's analogy for this is as such:
You have a uncanny urge to f*%^ cars. In the past, you have to keep this inside because the morals and strictures of your immediate community would judge this temper the act itself. Now the internet allows you to find the other 268 weirdos in the world who share this particular need to put your d*^* in a tailpipe. Now you're a community!
@ The End (and this whole thread): In Other Words, society has gone mad. I blame Covid and the measures taken to control it, esp. the lockdowns (I'm a lefty, a Green, so don't jump to conclusions). The combination of fear and isolation is pretty lethal.
Granted, the setup was the extreme reaction of Democrats (not the Left) to Trump's election - which was their fault. That was intolerable; they simply couldn't face it (happens I was in a room full of Dems that election night, so I know whereof I speak), so they disassociated. Add a pandemic and an incompetent response to that, and they took all of us with them.
It's been mad all along. We're just going through a rapid change in the mechanisms of social control. Lamestream consumerism and individualism is waning while new secular moralism evolves to fill the void. This had to happen (was documented by the more observant commentators before 2015) because of the replacement of top-down broadcast culture with bottom-up ad-hoc networks. Now the ruling class is learning to control those networks and the new secular moralism is happy with that.
It's all very interesting but just a bunch of self-absorbed navel gazing in relation to the effects of empire on the rest of the world (people, other biology etc).
I've been wondering about the network dynamics of pile-ons, shameings, and cancellations for years. Each participant chooses to do so, spends a little of their social capital doing so, takes on a certain risk, in other words: invests. Why? I was thinking about it while walking the dogs this morning and about how Americans get such a morale boost from national aggression, i.e. the presidential approval bump from bombing or otherwise making foreigners suffer. I cannot make sense of these things without believing that people are rewarded by hurting others, i.e. that they really are sadists. Ofc there are other important forces at play but without sadism I don't think you have a convincing theory. Idk why Taibbi and others that talk so much about these stories always steer clear of it.
The chilling discovery of so many recent brain studies since the cost of fMRIs have become reasonably inexpensive, is that the *impetus for "piling on", etc. comes from the Primitive Human brain located at the base of the
brain, and rising from the top end of the spinal cord.
Human beings are rewarded with *pleasure for activities that *further their survival chances. Thus, babies have taste buds not only on the tongue, but also on the sides of cheeks, and on the upper palate. As you all know, babies will suckle on a *rock ! Because suckling is the *most important way of contributing to a baby's chance for survival, and you can see their *eyes roll back with the pleasure with which the brain rewards them with for suckling.
Now, very little "advertized", but certainly well known among the scientific circles, adult human beings are *also given a pleasure response for *hitting a perceived enemy - animal or human - furthering their "protection instinct" for their offspring and other aspects of what they perceive to be their *own survival values.
Both men and women have experienced being in a fight, having the knuckles connect with cranial *bone tissue and being surprised to find (as I was the first time I felt it, back in high school, that there *is a shot of pleasure created *by that contact. Survival reward from the Lizard Brain.
I did not pursue that "as a career", because it quickly occurred to me that, *if that is wired into MY brain, it is also (as we have long since *proven) wired into *all humans, to differing degrees, both male and female. It is wired into the Brain Stem, or what we pejoratively call our "Lizard Brain", but it is *there in all of us. The piling on to others (safely, as online) is *still rewarded by the Lizard Brain, and is much *safer than "piling on" physically, unless the numbers greatly favor "your team".
So, abusing animals - check - the Lizard Brain ...... abusing and beating up fellow humans - check - the Lizard Brain. There is *rarely a case of abuse that is sourced in the area of higher functioning of the brain, except in cases of crime or war analysis (both of which are *rewarded by the Lizard Brain, because we are still killing neighbors and stealing their "goods".)
The Lizard Brain is *all instinct and emotion. Its dictates are often *justified and *excused by the higher functioning areas of the brain, but they rarely originate there.
That is the prime engine of mob violence. Everyone leaves the "higher mind at the door, and they work as a group from the level of the mass Lizard Brain.
In terms of geologic time, humankind is only the bat of an eyelash away from our cave-dwelling ancestors. Our *technology has wildly advanced, but when you look at the way we *apply that technology, we find the Lizard Brain there, still happily at work. The cave man used a club to beat their neighbors over the head and then steal their food, families, etc. from them.
(Perhaps the original impetus for slavery ? )
Today we have astounding nuclear weapons with which we do what ?
Beat (or threaten to beat) our neighbors over the head with, so we can steal their food, families, etc. THAT has not changed. The main thing to have changed is only *very impressive "upgrades" to weapons and strategies for beating the neighbor over the head with same.
This is why the cycle cannot be *reasoned away. It must be recognized for what it is, and then a plan for *dealing with that reality created via reason as we go forward. No one has ever successfully *argued the Lizard Brain out of *anything.
Some of the comments in TK News deserve to hoisted to articles. This is one.
My anything-goes Substack blog "thefsb" (click my name here for a link) would gladly publish it. If you're interested, you can email thefsb at substack or comment on something there.
It quite matters here, as The End states, that we differentiate between the followers and "the core group that drives them". The followers are, more or less, naive victims. The core group has a monstrious goal against c.1500-c.2000 Western civ.
I would question this assumption as well. I think the sadists are being manipulated and used by others that have clear goals that do not involve the sadism as an end but as a means to free social and cultural capital that is currently tied up in traditions and institutions. Same as how the Bolsheviks were used to destroy the traditional society and monarchy of Russia. I think its not the sadists that are a new phenomenon but the intentional weaponization of them that is a 20th century invention. I could be wrong though.
OK, yes, agreed. Three groups here, maybe more. The sadists exist, and are part of the group I was (above) calling the drivers. But of course they are being used, too, via "intentional weaponization", and are different from those who want to re-form civilization. The former are merely (a particular form of) selfish, while the latter have an end goal of severe social stratification and control a la feudalism.
1. Global oligarchs find that traditional culture and institutions interfere with maximizing profit. That would include private property for "the serfs" I think. Thats all just capital tied up where they can't get to it.
2. A more esoteric view of the whole of life on earth as a single out of our control process that at this point is using societal bonds, culture and institutions as fuel with the end result being a more liquid, faster moving substrate of "emancipated capital." Kind of like how gasoline doesn't burn until it transitions from liquid to vapor.
"Same as how the Bolsheviks were used to destroy the traditional society and monarchy of Russia." The trouble with this is that the Bolsheviks really just replaced the "traditional society" - they were very Russian. Lenin was a lot like Peter the Great (a very mixed compliment) and Stalin re-incarnated Ivan the Terrible. You don't escape 1000 years of history all that easily.
It does appear that the country has done some growing up since then; doing better than we are.
Did you study evolutionary biology in college, or what was your focus? Your posts are crisp and informative, thank you. Some of what you write almost seems intuitive as well. That doesn't diminish the points. Your scientific-historical perspective is a perfect read on the current crisis, but one that has severe costs because it implies a choice. Like the escaped slave running into barbarian tribes: do we continue to behave in concert with this postmodern dreck, pretending America still exists as it was, but suffering totalitarian ruin? Or do we fully resort to tribalism, resuscitate as many of the saplings of civilization as possible, walling off, going to war, killing other Americans in a total destruction of this nation but a preservation of a future civilization? That's the Mad Max/Idiocracy future, indeed. It didn't have to be this way, but one of our biggest weaknesses in the past thirty-fifty years has been to allow stupid people to say stupid things and not be corrected for fear of judgment, that includes the youth and their naturally sociopathic distrust of mature systems of organization. I think it's going to be a slow crawl to destruction and reformation. The totalitarianism that has developed will continue until all past norms are entirely trampled and there's a generational break - then it'll be Mad Max mayhem, with few wizened fellows to reeducate the warriors. I write fiction and studied literature, however, so this is also an indulgence of my particular brand of intelligence.
Not sure why it's "_even_ the religious among us have lost"... etc. (emphasis added)
The "religious"--whether formally or informally, strictly or loosely read--are something like world-leaders in the loss of an ability to think intelligently--about victims or many other things. There are exceptions to this, of course. But those are to the credit of the individual's innate characteristics, not the supposed virtues of his or her chosen faith--which so many others, no "exceptions" themselves, whose religion apparently leaves much as it "found them."
But you make, perhaps, a good point: "not (or less) Torquemada, but (than) Calvin"; for me, that's tempered by my now-more-abiding notice of a certain marked sadism in so much of contemporary life. Sadistic impulses--the potential for them--are in every one of us. This is, like so much about the world that remains too taboo for open mention or acknowledgement, simply entirely unwelcome.
I note, without surprise, that nowhere in the commentary does either the term or the concept of sadism even appear in the analysis of "Lolita" or its depraved main character. I don't pretend to know what Nabokov was up to in writing "Lolita"--beyond the general interests and motives of most novelists. Nor would I particularly recommend the character of Humbert Humbert as an object lesson for those interested in better seeing the sadistic tendencies--which are not new--in human nature.
What we'd be better served by grasping is not the ghoulishly obvious cases of sadism but the way it works in so many who'd typically never be suspected of it. Again, this is a _human_ characteristic the potential for which is always present in _all_ of us. The difference between those who keep a lid on it and those who don't relate to many and varied circumstantial and accidental features of life.
That doesn't strike me as being a prominent insight gained by reading Nabokov's "Lolita".
Shakespeare had more insights into human nature in general and its darker--including its sadistic--aspects. And that's before the Marquis ever put pen to paper.
But this being Matt's forum, they're his literary tastes to exhibit here.
I am a religious person who thinks deeply about it. But not a Calvinist -- one of those people who does not accept penal substitution theories along with about the first 1000 yrs of Christianity. But I agree with you. I keep seeing H Clinton in a little Mao suit raising the flag of the cultural revolution -- everything is evil but us!
Confronting the woke on hypocrisy today is like when televangelist preachers were getting caught up in sex scandals back in the 80s. People will tolerate a sincere asshole fanatic, but hypocrites will never survive.
i would have said that it's more a banality-of-evil type of subject. cruelty and the bid for/abuse of power are not peculiar to one gender/ethnicity/class or even cultural sub-group. it's in the bones, perhaps the most human characteristic of all. or as human a characteristic as any other maybe.
something about social dynamics and maybe a bit about Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" something something....
I think the evil here is profound in its scope if not literary dramatics. I think the damage and trauma done to humanity by the two world wars led to a profound reorganization of what society considers acceptable and in order to defeat the darkness they looked a bit too deeply and the darkness got inside of them.
«In the discussion today, the guests were being asked to speculate on the reasons for certain of Trump’s recent statements and actions: the congratulatory call to Erdogan, the invitation to Duterte, the rather unanticipated statement that he would be “honored” to meet with Kim Jong-un. Why would Trump speak in this way about rulers who murdered their own countrymen, even their own relatives, rigged elections, oppressed opponents, threw reporters in jail?
One after another, guests speculated that Trump was trying to upend long-standing American foreign policy, or was speaking thoughtlessly, or had some hidden negotiating strategy in mind. To each of these guests, Johnson responded courteously, respectfully, clearly signaling that these were just the sorts of sober, serious, thoughtful comments he wished to encourage. Then it happened. One of the guests, I do not know whom it was, said quietly, “I think it is envy.” Johnson erupted almost before the words had been uttered. In a loud, flustered voice, he burst out, “But you cannot mean that you think he would like to do those things! But, but, but, surely you do not mean that.” Johnson went on in this way, speaking over his guest, who was trying, so far as I could hear, to say “Yes, I think that is just what he wants to do.”
It was so manifestly, obviously, undeniably true»
The argument is quite logical: evil people think evil thoughts, speak evil words, perform evil deeds, so it is illogical to think that when they say something it is not for evil reasons. :-)
No offense but I don't discuss anything with anyone who starts a comment off with "Ah, the..." Its just a clear sign of excessive pedantry, arrogance, and a general lack of knowing anything about anything.
"....and a general lack of knowing anything about anything...." Speaking of excessive pedantry, arrogance, and (especially) a general lack of knowing anything about anything. And, of course---no offense.
“while someone who traffics in genuinely evil choices on a daily basis, dumping deadly toxins or doing PR for dictators or governing the State of New York by tribute, can still win Man of the Year or a key to a city with a donation or two.”
Great point! I live in NY and thought wow, why is he writing a book? It's still going on and you don't know what is happening yet. This book was published last year and he was given 5 million. Who in publishing is that stupid not to see how bad that was. That is a story someone should look into. Who said yea let's give him 5 mil to write the story.? Someone that wanted to help him get re-elected?
May not even be that sinister. Could be that someone in publishing saw all of the daily viewers and thought there was potentially a shitload of money to be made from a book.
The internet allows us to be stupid and judgmental without even really trying. We get handed a bunch of "black and white" choices and are ready to take sides without a better look at what the noise is about.
Given two-party duopoly, that polarizing frame is implicit in voting.
Worse, it encourages the pop media narrative that the entirety of someone's personality can be glimpsed by learning their vote in the most recent Presidential election- or, as a more pseudo-sophisticated pose, by reviewing their pattern of voting over the years. As if that single (set of) decision(s) amounted to an X-ray of someone's soul. Even when the decisions were made by someone (like myself) who typically feels essentially cornered into voting for the less unattractive choice, in elections for Congress of the Presidency. Yet this simplistic frame that an individual's vote says all anyone needs to known about them is ubiquitous in American popular media, and discourse. And one need look no further than the accusations, stereotypes, valorization and derision that fly in Internet comments, triggered by nothing more than a single bit of knowledge (or assumption) about someone's admission of vote or party affiliation.
This really is the state of the discourse in American society, encouraged in "newspapers of record" like the Washington Post and NY Times, and the range of TV networks who still control the preponderance of the agenda of media attention, from Newsmax to MSNBC. I think the power of the Internet- including Youtube- is still pretty marginal in comparison to the TV networks; I'm not despairing over that reality, but I think it's naive to imagine that the Internet has somehow supplanted "old media" in most respects. Above all, it's crucial to realize that "the Internet" is not a single entity- like, say, CNN. Although the medium is often contextualized in that misleading way- particularly by those who view it as unwanted competition from an uncontrolled frontier, and seek to put it in its place.
That said, if you really want to make an end run around television, the Internet is not sufficient; you have to read. A lot. Continuously. Including the primary sources and most articulate exponents of the views with which you find the most disagreement. Because if you have no familiarity with opposing arguments, you don't fully comprehend your own. But this gets back to the lack of critical thinking exercise in most American schools (and everywhere else, but formal schooling is supposed to be the place where people get equipped with these skills, and most Americans lack them...only singling out Americans because as "my people", they're the ones I know best; I'm not that cosmopolitan. Although it is my impression that the British educational system places much more emphasis on debating skill as a faculty that isn't reserved for law students.)
The whole dismal business of insisting on sticking angel wings on one polarized (political party or ideological) side, and devil horns on the other- it's so tired, so robotic, so dull-witted, that it's tedious to read. There was so much of it in the Paul Jay discussion that reading comments got to be like wading through concrete. Reading down from the top of this discussion has at least proved to have some entertainment value for me. (I admit, when I read, it's all about the relationship of my own perspective to the material on the page. After all, who else is doing the reading? I couldn't read on behalf of someone else if I tried.)
One more story to make all of you Republicans even more paranoid.
The facility I work at is primarily female. Consequently the men, or at least the men who have been there for a while, all know each other. We're all pretty friendly. When meet up we compare notes on our observed lunacy. And there is oodles. How can I put this delicately? Women can be nuts. Completely certifiable.
If you feel it's necessary you can now hate me. It's a-ok. I sympathize. I hate me sometimes too.
One guy, who I've known for about 15 years, made the move into management. Only a few penises have made the leap. All have regretted it. But it's more money so there's that.
So my buddy & I were at the facility's smoke shack.(It's really a gazebo). They segregated smokers there because they could. I quit smoking years ago but we were chatting so I tagged along.
A young black girl was having an anti-Trump seizure. A long anti-Trump seizure. So, all the guy did after she finished was say, "Okay, you don't like Trump. Can you tell me his crime?"
She began shrieking hysterically about racists & such as she backed away from him & left. About 5 minutes later another young black woman showed up and started photographing him with her phone from a nice safe distance like he was a Yeti sighting.
Within an hour he was called into his boss' office, reprimanded & told that he was forbidden to talk politics at work or he could face termination. Nothing happened to the girl.
Now, if anyone can explain this as being even remotely fair, I'd love to read your thoughts.
You and others who have to endure this kind of harassment should consider filing a lawsuit on the basis of sex discrimination. It's past time for shit to get real.
Well, I'm basically on a sinking ship anyway. Their staff shortages are chronic. It's so bad they've raised the shift differential for working weekends to $5/hr. & doubled the weekend wage. I'm currently making over $40/hr. to mostly watch TV. I make sure the clients are well cared for and have access to the shit they like to do, otherwise I'm pretty bored.
I mean I'm not stupid. I'll take the money guilt free. But $40/hr. doesn't seem sustainable. Even at that rate few apply.
I've worked with violent clients for most of my time there. When a client is in a behavior the facility has a code phrase staff is supposed to announce over the intercom. When someone uses it all male staff are supposed to run to the area where the behavior is happening to assist. Let me repeat that first part: ALL MALE STAFF. The women are exempt.
The reality is that, at any given time, there just aren't that many men working there. I've made pages & had no one show. Yet there was a veritable army of women milling about.
I suppose the trade off is that I'm not allowed to work with female clients. Because, y'know, all men are potential rapists. I guess I don't argue because I'd rather work with men. Women have extra bodily fluids so more there's more to clean when things go awry.
That's not a foregone conclusion, and choices have to be made. It sounds like Spiderbaby decided the trade-offs were worth it. Other people are making other choices. For instance, Amy Cooper is suing her employer for wrongful termination. The FAIR Foundation is also tracking and assisting other lawsuits.
Best thing you can do is not get involved in any of it.
People are downright psychotic these days. There's a guy I have to work with who if politics or COVID, (read as: politics,) are brought up and anyone even questions one of his MSNBC plots, he becomes instantly unhinged and starts name-calling, ranting and just melts down.
I am gathering that this has been a regular thing for his 24 years there.
So... when I get snapped at for asking even a work related question, I simply turn on my heel and walk straight away.
I go find something else to keep busy with.
It's better than giving up my sweetheart job over something as dumb as "some cunt looking for someone to flip out on". I'm sucka free.
For life!
Now, if you hate the job... there's definitely potential for entertainment there triggering the programmed NPCs into insanity.
I'm a woman, and some of the coworkers I've gotten along with and respected most were men. I've also worked with a few men who I'm pretty sure were clinically insane and should never be allowed to interact with society in general. So I think it's more that sane people and lunatics shouldn't work together. Crazy comes in both genders.
I'm a woman, and I don't like where that could lead. It depends on the individuals. I'm in an industry that's 95% male, and I get along just fine. I have a hide like a rhino, and a focus on deliverables.
Nietzsche, one of the philosophers who influenced Nabokov, argues in On the Genealogy of Morals that it is the category of "evil" itself which blinds one to any nuance or ambivalence in moral thinking. It's not just the woke who divide the world into categories of good and evil however; your average right-wing grifter barks constantly about the evil left, postmodernist marxists, George Soros, etc. and they make a nice living doing so. Nietzsche described this whole way of thinking as "slave morality" because he saw it as a way of manipulating people so damaged by life, so traumatised, that the way to influence them and gain their loyalty was to channel their resentment using simplistic moral categories. Nietzsche thought this social psychology explained the success of Judeo-Christian morality; today it might explain the business model of "Hate Inc".
I'm no expert on Nietzsche, but I think he would actually consider WOKEISM to be a form of slave morality, for the way it glorifies weakness. This was one of his big criticisms of Christianity, after all, this bizarre morality that treats weakness as a virtue.
But I suspect Nietzsche would view current society more as The Last Men. They've lost all ambition, are fearful, and only want safety and petty happiness. Which sounds way too familiar to me.
I agree with that hunch. I suspect he'd reject, outwardly at least, the victimist stance of _these_ people (the "Woke"), wallowing in their self-justifying "victim-hood" even while he was himself no (honest) stranger to such stuff. Whatever his insights, Nietzsche lacked nothing in a barely disguised sense of victim-hood. His writings are the stuff of a man who burned under the resentment of the world which never granted him the recognition he felt he deserved--and probably because no world _could_ have ever granted sufficient recognition to such a professional victim. In that, if in nothing else, he and the BLM mob are joined in un-righteous indignation that seems to have few peers.
It may be worth observing that, in _The Genealogy of Morals_, he theorized that Christianity was a way of reversing the values of the ancient world, which generally emphasized strength, mastery, and victory. Similarly what I think you're calling Wokeism, the seeming fetishization of victimhood, would seem to be a way for a defeated people to reverse the outcomes of various political and cultural (i.e. religious) battles by changing the ways in which the outcomes are evaluated.
I confess, though, that I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. The word _woke_, already dialectical, seems to be uncertainly ascriptive as well. It is hard to know exactly what it refers to. Going into the streets because one sees a man strangled by the police on television seems like a fairly natural reaction not requiring much ideology.
Christ turned the tables on the ancient world when He said that those who would be greatest of all must be servants of all. And what really was unique about Christianity was its praise of humility -- not victimhood. ("A religion of women and slaves!") What's going on now is very close to the religious hypocrisy Christ condemned in the religious establishment of his time, something entirely different
Oh, I think our ruling class (here in the US, at least) are very far from hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue; these people have no use for virtue whatever. They do evil and revel in it. They're proud of spending 750 billion dollars on unnecessary weaponry and warfare just to be doing it, to say nothing of the ways in which they do business and finance it.
So what's a loser (including women and slaves) to do? No one stops desiring power, for we are willful animals and want to do what we want to do. To solve the problem, it's necessary to alter one's values and behavior so as to undercut the existing system of values. I think Nietzsche portrays this as a negative, as a form of destruction, but I see it as a radically brilliant response to defeat.
Nietzsche did write: “The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect [Geist] of the powerless injected into it..." So he didn't view the "slave revolt in morality" as a purely regressive development. Without it we would be a bit like the animals, socially ossified into natural hierarchies, without mass societies or a history of progress, innovation, and so on. Right-wing interpretations of Nietzsche completely fail to appreciate this. I think Nietzsche's point was that in modernity, everyone is a "slave" in the sense that they are subject to the hyper-sociality of modern society, a "social straitjacket" in which everyone is constantly judging everyone else. Psychological damage and "ressentiment" is an inevitable outcome. This makes us open to manipulation by ascetic "priests" who hate life in all its ambivalence but also, as you point out, it can be used to spur positive social change. If you're interested, Jeffrey Jackson's book 'Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories' is very good on this.
Great comment. It's like we are programmed to think in a binary. It's so demonstrably effective today as then. It takes a tremendous amount of intellectual discipline and time to think things through properly and fully, making a conclusion as simplistic as a moral judgement almost impossible.
In the western world, the US, Europe, Canada, et al, we are at a fork in morality. On one tine are the progressives, and on the other are conservatives. And you can call them whatever you like, but the basic fact that they do not share a common version of good and bad is all you really need to realize. And until there is a political and cultural reckoning, episodes like the Cuomo affair or the response to COVID, War, and pretty much everything else becomes a focal point in the struggle for cultural dominance, much like two dogs attempting to settle who is in charge.
Cuomo is expendable, but only for the transgressions of #metoo, as he will be replaced by a reliable Democrat. Northam in VA was actually threatened by a Republican taking his place, and that can not stand. See, the Dems thought that with the assertion of Obama that they had won the culture war, but the pushback during his term was a clear sign that they hadn't. Indeed, Trump's election over HRC was further proof that they were not in the position they thought they were, so they have done a full-court press and looped in all the far left that they can, as they cannot afford any loss of numbers.
Nabakov, much like Ellroy whom I have been rereading this month, isn't canceled because this generation cannot read complicated novels.
One of my courses was Readers' Advisory. Librarians used to do this (not much now). I never slogged through Proust, either, but have liked Anthony Powell's 12 volume Dance to the Music of Time...which has a character based on Crowley.
You had me at: "In the western world, the US, Europe, Canada, et al, we are at a fork in morality. On one tine are the progressives, and on the other are conservatives. And you can call them whatever you like, but the basic fact that they do not share a common version of good and bad is all you really need to realize. And until there is a political and cultural reckoning, episodes like the Cuomo affair or the response to COVID, War, and pretty much everything else becomes a focal point in the struggle for cultural dominance, much like two dogs attempting to settle who is in charge."
other novels that go on (so far) unscathed (not that there's a lot of deep and complicated stuff going on here:
by Brett Easton Ellis:
"Less Than Zero" (1985), "American Psycho" (1991)
by Chuck Palahniuk :
"Fight Club"(1996)
by Dominick Dunne,
Fatal Charms : And Other Tales of Today (2012) (read)
unflattering journalism/memoir on Hollywood and film-star celebrity life. For gore and immorality, fiction is challenged to equal reality depicted here. Dunne, as correspondent for the magazine, "Vanity Fair", also covered the murder trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of murdering their parents. Try that for twisted morals and gore.
____________
the listing is not to be read as an indication that _I've_ read these novels.
There is no such thing as 'cancelled.' That just means that some people don't read them. Plus ca change. American Psycho is a fascinating, and deeply troubling, experimental work.
Understood. It’s more a comment about BEE (not his books) now being a persona non grata, just as JK is. I’m not aware of anyone attacking the Harry Potter books either, only JK personally. She has FU money so it doesn’t matter to her.
Rowling gave a million quid to the No side during the Scottish independence referendum, helping keep us as an English colony, so I am not the biggest fan. But the shit she has taken about the whole tired trans subject is absolutely unbelievable.
I thought American Psycho sucked. Yeah, i can in a way appreciate it intellectually and on premise. But the writing is just god awful.
I loved Martin Amis' London Fields and Money. But it seems that they weren't quite as loved by the British due to portrayals of the working classes. I have to admit that they got a point that i had missed.
Don't forget the capitalist need for 'creative destruction', so poetically and accurately described in _The Communist Manifesto_ -- ''All that is solid melts into air....'' and all that, and its later version: ''Move fast a break stuff.''
It's like I say: the Capitalist Dogma of Perpetual Growth and material accumulation is all fun and games, until you eat your way through your resource base and end up drowning in your own shit. It's a reduction of human consciousness to the level of yeast.
It's sort of interesting that the human brain seems to fail to perceive so many obvious things, like if you eat all your food you'll go hungry etc. Of course many do, but so many don't.
The timing of this amuses me. I watched "Baseball Twitter" explode with outrage over a clip of a Colorado Rockies game, in which a person in the crowd appeared to be yelling The N-word over and over while a black player was at-bat.
Former players, TV analysts, baseball writers, and other assorted Twitter blue-checks quickly piled on. "Find this vile man and ban him from games forever!" "No, arrest him!" "It's 2021 and no one around this man even reacted as he yelled that."
Then another video of the incident appeared. The shouter in the stands can be seen, he was looking off to his right, about 20 seats down, where the Rockies' mascot, named Dinger, was. He was trying to get Dinger's attention. "Dinger! Dinger!"
Not a one of the outrage mob apologized for being a part of this societal rot. Ah, well. Until the next pitchfork-and-torch session!
A lot to think about. Could Nabokov have shame his ancestor led the inquiry into the Petrashevsky the Circle that sent Dostoevsky to Siberia? Could there be generational rivalry? Could N. (a more proud lineage) have some sense of entitlement like AC?
Connolly, Julian W. “Nabokov’s Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and The Gentle Creature.” Nabokov Studies 4, no. 1 (1997): 15–36.
Overlooking the evil and spotting morality seem to be frequent traits of modern media and modern opinion. Cuomo has enjoyed a public pass for decades of, as Matt called it, “dickishness”. Now all of a sudden he is newly discovered as evil. Amazingly, the man sentenced thousands of elderly people to death by putting covid patients into nursing facilities. His ego and his politics were so huge that he could not be bested by Trump who had outfitted to USS Enterprise to accomodate and treat all of them. Sentencing people to death to save his ego seems a lot more evil than his “dickishness”. How could media have such messed up morality to not notice the difference?
They notice alright, then they gobble Adderall and start writing thousands of stories about what a GOOD FUCKING JOB he's doing and give him awards and continue not reporting on everything he does wrong.
If they're told by D leadership or worse, the CIA it gets a pass then it gets a pass.
Matt: As a subscriber and long-time fan, I ask you to consider the only comment that kept me listening to what seemed very close to a crackpot video. The commentator said, "If the Covid pandemic were real and dangerous, how come we have not seen the corpses of the homeless in L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere stacked like cord wood along the avenues of their camps." Every person to whom I have posed this question has wrinkled up perplexed. Whilst on a beach, give it some thought.
And this is exactly what happened in New York - the homeless who died of COVID were buried in mass graves on Hart Island. So this thing that according to you isn't happening, is actually both happening and receiving a lot of press coverage.
It is happening, but we are efficient. However, it may be that the plague is only gathering its forces. A defensive façade consisting of happy talk is not going to be very effective if it really gets going.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That even after 17 months of covid, you still don't know what the mortality rate is? It's around 1%-2%, some people say as low as 0.1%. So is it really such a huge surprise to you that 99% of a lot of homeless people is still a lot of homeless people?
When i see situations like Cuomo, i'm always taken back to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. At the end, where Bill Haydon was uncovered as the mole. And Smiley and the others realize that, or course it was Bill Haydon, everyone always knew it and no one wanted to admit that of acknowledge it, even to themselves.
How could anyone not have known that Andrew Cuomo was always a total piece of shit. Either they were too flat out dumb, or knew it all the time but played the three monkeys because he was on their team.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? How the Dems had a wankfest over him because he was going to go after Trump? And told the women who he assaulted him not to report him because he was too valuable? Same energy. Ditto the Clintons, etc, rinse and repeat.
And for any whatabouters out there, ditto for Trump and many Repubs. Same energy. I guess we're all fucked.
I wasn't clear. I wasn't calling Trump the hypocrite here, just a lot of his supporters. Definitely including politicians. And Trump not the only Republican that gets a pass on many issues from the party. Look at Rick Scott, for example.
"People tend to believe evil is something external to them – yet it is a projection of the shadow onto others. As one who projects the principle for absolute and unresolvable evil onto others – it is to the degree that one condemns others and finds evil in others, that one is unconscious of the same thing within oneself, or the potential of that within oneself. It is a projection of one’s own shadow."
With all due respect to Jung, good exists - evil is non-existence. Truth is beauty, beauty truth .. . 'that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know'.
For example, not long ago a woman driving a car whilst primping on the cell-phone crashed into me. This was evil. Banal evil - she didn't intentionally crash into me - but still evil.
Nevertheless, out of the goodness of my heart (& after her insurance paid off.) I forgave her .. . and the evil [she did] was washed away like tears in the rain, like it never happened, non-existent.
Or take the coiled-up rattlesnake. There is nothing evil about the rattlesnake's warning - it's a fair warning. Nevertheless, if I put the snake in my pocket and he bit me .. . that would be evil.
It's amazing what this moral condemnation has in common with mental illness. The hyper black and white thinking seems to be the Splitting of Borderline Personality disorder. Virtue Signaling is narcissism. If people of color don't get the vaccine first is privileging white people at the expense of a more vulnerable population. If black people get the vaccine first it's experimenting on them. Is this the Double Bind of narcissistic abuse? Adherents tend not to be the most rational people around with academic support coming from the least academically rigorous areas of the academy. This behavior is championed by charlatans and supported by well meaning people who don't know any better.
Racism and such are problems, but leaders in various movements like Robin Diangelo favor some equivalent of The Four Humours Theory to address them while padding their wallets and stroking their egos.
After a weekend bouncing back & forth between Fox & CNN it was easy to see that each network has their own pre-arranged gripe schedule.
CNN harps on anti-vaxxers(they're mostly Republicans), the "Insurrection"(hey, they're all Republicans), condemnations of Cuomo that looked more like strategy sessions for his defense team, CRT(anyone who questions it is misinformed &/or suffering loss of white privilege) and not much else.
Fox does CRT(crazy liberals & Marxists), anti-vaxxers(they're mostly minorities), the Border(crazy liberal Marxists did it all), Covid(it's all a crazy liberal Marxist wet dream) & not much else.
I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention. As long as they put the required number of minorities along with the occasional rainbow flag in their ads they instantly become "part of the solution. The "news" is, much like the dinosaurs, completely extinct, at least as far as TV news goes.
As I mentioned elsewhere I also watched Biden's Town Hall from 2 weeks ago. In among Joe's word pasta ramblings, he'd occasionally hit lucidity. At one lucid point, Joe was trying to illustrate how he was going to make corporate America "pay their fair share" because he had the experience that he gained in Delaware where "150 corporations...150 corporations...(let's repeat it one more time)150 corporations are incorporated." Of course they're incorporated there because Delaware doesn't make them "pay their fair share" or, more appropriately, pay anything at all. So Joe's example was illustrating the exact opposite of Joe's intended purpose. Yet Don Lemon, handsome teleprompter reader playing TV journalist that is, stood there nodding all po' faced and subservient as if Joe wasn't making a complete fool of himself.
Oh yeah, and the audience clapped.
This started me thinking about experiments I had read about where researchers were trying to discern if seeing is really believing or do we tend to see what what we believe we're going to see irregardless of what's actually there.
One experiment took place in a normal college classroom. A professor would be lecturing as normal and then a stranger would enter the classroom. The teacher & the man would argue & then the interloper would pull an object out and stab the teacher with it before running out of the room. The teacher stood up & revealed that it was all pantomime. He then asked the class to detail what they saw. I do believe that every witness said that the man had a knife. Of course he didn't. What did have was a banana. Yet no one noticed.
Nothing illustrates this idea more than the story of North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park. Park said she was mugged by 3 black women in Chicago. As the women tried to escape, Park grabbed the woman who had her wallet and began yelling for assistance. The black woman, much to her credit, began yelling, “You’re a racist! The color of my skin doesn’t make me a thief” as a crowd of white people gathered. The white folk prevented Park from calling the police & they also let the black woman escape. The white people then started calling Park a racist, one even going so far as pointing at Park and telling her child, “Look at that racist, that’s the problem we have.”
My point here is that it seems we've reached a weird cultural point where huge chunks of the country are so buried in their "belief systems" they can no longer discern reality. In other words, culturally, many of us can no longer see the fucking banana.
That is terrifying.
Oh yeah, told ya I was long winded.
The people that run the world don't give a shit about ideology or political parties. They certainly don't give a shit about the dumb peasants who think those things do matter and waste their time taking sides and arguing.
From Obama's """scaled back""" party:
John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, who owns beach front property (sea levels????), flew in his private jet (CO2 emissions????) to attend oppressed Obama's birthday party at his $15 million beach front property (sea levels????).
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9869959/John-Legend-Chrissy-Teigen-Dwyane-Wade-arrive-Marthas-Vineyard-Obamas-birthday-bash.html
As a member of the resident peasantry of the state of the party, i was just humbled and proud to be able to kick in a small portion of my tax dollars to provide pay (and surely overtime) for the legion of state and environmental police required to provide security for the great man and his sophisticated, vaccinated guests. You non-residents, poor souls, only got to pay for the Secret Service.
https://babylonbee.com/news/obama-birthday-party-guests-play-light-hearted-game-of-pin-the-drone-on-the-middle-eastern-country
Pin the drone on the Middle East could be the party game of the future.
That was brilliant. Thanks.
We're screwed if it is, and Joe keeps hitting the lampshade 200 ft away.
We're screwed anyway. You are talking about Joe's piss stream right? Because I hear that the White House janitors are fed up & want the old boy diapered ASAP.
Nice points! That Yeonmi Park story really hits home.
I think the reality is that as long as we don’t acknowledge that there are some very serious psy-ops deployed against the general population, we’re not really getting to the heart of the issue when it comes to CRT and the “Woke” Cultural revolution.
The promotion of Wokeness, CRT, these are literally play by play the kinds of ideologies that are intentionally inserted into society in order to force its collapse.
Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector, referred to this as “ideological subversion” and outlined the four stages of how these subversion campaigns are implemented in a society or enemy regime, play by play:
“Make the cops look like corrupt pigs, make the criminals look like the good guys, undermine the spiritual and faith foundations of the society, promote other artificial cults and ideologies to replace their foundational principles, and yes, encourage people to study useless subjects and get useless degrees, discourage the study of practical and scientific work.”
That’s literally all mentioned in the first ten minutes or so of his presentation. And it’s literally play for play for Woke CRT stuff is promoting. Is it a coincidence?
No.
Fast forward to today’s Frankfurt School Frankenstein Woke generation, and it’s play for play, just like a former spy Yuri Bezmenov articulated decades ago. This is more MK-Ultra stuff than it is a misguided debate on equality and civil rights…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE
And it should not be contentious to say this stuff is easily spotted because it uses a formula. Whether it’s KGB 1980s cultural warfare or 21st century Five Eyes psy-ops, the basic formula for ideological subversion remains the same. The problem is they are now directing these weapons of war in the form of ideological warfare and psychological warfare against their own domestic populations, rather than just foreign adversaries.
So let’s please stop talking about CRT and Wokism like they are just another crazy idea and debate that’s gotten out of hand, which somehow just managed to penetrate the boardrooms of the most powerful corporations, the most established educational institutions and the corridors of the greatest government powers.
The way in which it has been able to spread at such a breath-taking rate is actually one of the biggest tip offs that there’s a well-coordinated ideological warfare operation, which is what intelligence agencies do… they run ideological warfare operations. The constant msm amplification of the same messages is just further evidence for something much more coordinated. As Caitlin Johnstone wrote not long ago, “The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media, Now it Is the Media.” Most of the messaging is just an extension of the intel narratives.
However, with that said, the whole art of these covert operations is really about making it seem like it’s all normal, like these are all just natural debates and ideas that have just come about on their own and made their way into the scripts of all the major highly controlled news networks in the world, entrenched academia etc…
The case of how Venice, a tiny little island in a lagoon, was able to run a global trade and financial empire is arguably one of the best examples for understanding how today’s modern ideological warfare functions, including how something like CRT is being used. With its intelligence services, Venice profiled all the dukes and princes and diplomats, figured out what everyone’s weaknesses, vices or vulnerabilities were, and when needed they would exploit them. They would promote those who espoused the ideologies they thought useful for maintaining the “republic” and supported them. So today people like Di Angelo and Kendi get book deals and they just think it’s because they must be doing something right. These types of people are just useful idiots.
Venetian intelligence used people’s blind religious and ideological beliefs to get people to fight and kill each other, and made the loans to the various armies and parties on various sides and watched them go at it.
Technically, if people really knew their history, they would be able to spot the kinds of ideological warfare campaigns we’re seeing today, and the kind of civil war and Jacobinism that it’s meant to create.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Ss7ztvPtY
The same way Venice ran its empire is the same way the Modern Anglo-American financial establishment is able to maintain its control within the Western world. Most of those within the higher echelons of military, media, policy-making are actually some of the most brainwashed and ideologically blind individuals there are. They have been instructed and recruited in elite schools where a good deal of “talented” individuals are spotted and brought into the intelligence world.
What matters most for this kind of thing is spreading the right ideologies, creating the artificial debates and false binaries which end up herding people and getting the general population to tribalize and fight amongst itself, rather than pointing out that such ideological warfare is being deployed.
There are a million ways to make the same goal happen, CRT and the related Woke Revolution just happens to be the chosen method because it allows for a rewriting of American history and playing on historical injustices particular to America.
It’s no different than the Anglo-American intel networks’ “de-nazification” of Germany program run after WWII where Germans were essentially told that what happened happened because there was something innate inside them, something evil, and that unless they submitted themselves and took on the collective guilts of war criminals, and passed it on to the future generations, the same horrors would occur again, because of them. It was a means of completely castrating the population emotionally and intellectually using shame.
We see the same guilt and shame tactics being used today. It’s always the same formula. The predicates might change, the times and places may change, but the ideological subversion playbook remains essentially the same.
Didn't Brezhnev tell Reagan that the thing he liked best about America was its propaganda machine. I believe he went on to say that they had propaganda in Russia but nobody really believed it. Americans, on the other hand, bought their own propaganda completely?
It's always been surprising that Mk-Ultra is almost never discussed. It's mot like it didn't happen. It's not like lawsuits haven't been won against the government. The suit up in Canada comes to mind where Dr Cameron was doing some horrible, Mengele type, shit to innocent people.
His concept of, I believe, psychic driving, where he would take embarrassing snippets from patient's therapy sessions, such as I hate my father or mother or I want to fuck my father or mother and put them on endless tape loops fed to the patient in, I believe, a helmet they weren't allowed to remove. When people started
snapping & trying to escape, he'd dose them with a small amount of curare, paralyzing them for their journey to hell.
Women would go in with that entirely bullshit diagnosis called mild hysteria and come out incapable of holding their bowels or bladder. Many could no longer speak & had to be retaught.
All paid for with God fearing, Commie hating America's hard earned tax dollars.
There are historical reasons for why and how social engineering, behavior modification and other methods were developed with essentially scientific precision in the Western world. It's a bit of a long story for a comment section, but some of that history is discussed here:
https://youtu.be/smVvJzijAek?t=0
In respect to CRT and the Woke cultural revolution, the great irony is that instead of feeding the fire and treating the ideas like they are just another set of beliefs or philosophical outlook, wouldn't we be having a very different discussion if we just simply pointed out that these ideas have all the characteristics of a psy-op, of ideological subversion, and are largely only an issue because they have been amplified by a mainstream media establishment, which is largely a psy-op controlled by intel agencies...
Is the problem not that most of the people who argue against CRT and the Woke revolution are themselves not very familiar with how psychological warfare works, and the degree to which Western society is saturated with such operations?
Ironically, there is very little that isn't actually a direct or indirect spin-off from some psy-op. Most of the fear around being caught espousing a "conspiracy theory" has to do with.... guess what.... a psy-op, with plenty of cognitive dissonance such that people have increasingly learned to police themselves. While some might think that sounds over the top, or just like crazy conspiracy theorizing, I'd simply say the following: just look at the way the ideas are actually spread, and look at how the messaging is framed. Forget the narratives and ostensible reasons for this or that idea, take a moment to carefully consider how the ideas are spread, how they are amplified, and how the messaging is actually designed around appealing to group think and arbitrary authority, and always crafted in a way that discourages any kind of nuanced argument or independent thinking. When we're dealing with ideological subversion, it's always going to follow that kind of formula. It's always the same: use fear and shame, create an enemy image, manipulate the group dynamic such that anyone who is caught saying the wrong thing is shamed and exposed to one of the ultimate primal fears: being expelled from the group.
In evolutionary terms, being expelled from the group or tribe was equivalent to a death sentence, the end of the road. So the manipulation of the group, and finding out how to channel and direct that group energy in order to use it to crush outliers and alternative viewpoints is all based on appealing to the most primal and unconscious instincts in human beings. In social engineering lingo, it's "nudging" people by appealing to "below board" automatic thinking, rather than "above board" conscious thinking. The method is always about shaming people and making them feel bad for not having the right views such that at a certain point, they stop thinking about whether a certain view is right or wrong, but more about the undesirable and uncomfortable effects of holding or sharing a given view. With that kind of very finely crafted cognitive dissonance, you don't have to tell people what to think or convince them, they essentially learn take up the behaviors that avoid the uncomfortable feelings and nonthreatening situations. And it's all done with just a solid set of well-conceived "nudges."
However, once we're aware that this kind of method is constantly being used, it becomes hard not to see it. Most of the msm messaging and narratives are framed and promoted in a way that always has that same effect of zeroing in on the vulnerabilities mentioned above.
To quote Bertrand Russell who mused about the coming applications of social engineering on a mass scale in the postwar period:
"Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.''
Russell continued, ``The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship....The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.''
And... ``Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.''
-The Impact of Science on Society, Bertrand Russell.
But why stop there? Russell also wrote:
"In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called `co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them."
-The Scientific Outlook, Bertrand Russell
What's the goal? It's obvious: remake Western civilization into the image the Brave New World social engineers and their oligarchical masters desire. But they can't have a utopian brave new world society with a systematic eugenics program and pagan Malthusian world religion (thinly disguised under the veil of "protecting the environment" and "saving the planet") without first eliminating the heritage of the European Renaissance and Western Judeo-Christian tradition.
To quote something Aldous Huxley said, as recounted by his collaborator, Dr. Timothy Leary, in his biographical account Flashback:
``These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.''
Leary then chimed in: ``We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.''
Enter: "lived experience" and the obsession with promoting the primacy of one's feelings over every other consideration, regardless of the effects on society as a whole. By framing everything in terms of feelings and "lived experience," you're guaranteed that no truthful ideas or principles will ever make it into the discussion. Everyone gets to just create their own reality. And now they have access to all the drugs, entertainment and sex they need to content themselves. Just imagine an entire young generation reared with this kind of outlook. Fascism will delivered directly to your door.
While saying the crazy Woke ideas are really just tools for a much broader and creepier agenda may sound weird, it's true. Just because it's weird or doesn't seem to fit the current narrative, doesn't mean it's not true. If people have a sense of the history of cultural warfare and psychological warfare in the Western world, and if they're not just stuck thinking in terms of new cycles and itty-bitty arcs of time, none of this should sound surprising.
If it does sound surprising, well, welcome to the Brave New World. The messaging was successful. That being said, I'm hopefully, I think a lot of people are waking up, and the oligarchs are banking on the idea that we're all just blank slates, that no fundamental axiomatic change can occur in the population without them sanctioning it. Their blindness may very well be of epic proportion.
https://canadianpatriot.org/2021/07/19/progress-social-engineering-and-the-scientific-priesthood/
That screed is basically warmed-over Lyndon LaRouche.
Thank you for your comments on this article, very insightful.
re.
"And it should not be contentious to say this stuff is easily spotted because it uses a formula. Whether it’s KGB 1980s cultural warfare or 21st century Five Eyes psy-ops, the basic formula for ideological subversion remains the same. The problem is they are now directing these weapons of war in the form of ideological warfare and psychological warfare against their own domestic populations, rather than just foreign adversaries."
And how EXACTLY does the alleged "KGB 1980s cultural warfare" equate with "21st century Five Eyes psy-ops", if I may inquire?
False equivalence of the crudest, most spectacular kind imaginable much, Monsieur David Gosselin?
The rest of your jaw-droppingly insidious comment is riddled with equally irrational multiple fallacies, enhanced by inappropriate comparisons and non-existent parallels.
May I ask, which educational establishment have you graduated from?
Incidentally, and if I may, Nabokov's advice to a budding critic of which you appear to be a prime example:
"My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message.
Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means, place the "how" above the "what", but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.
Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent."
More to the point:
Q.
"As a writer, have you ever found criticism
instructive - not so much the reviews of your own books, but
any general criticism? From your own experiences, do you think
that an academic and a literary career nourish one another?
Since many writers today know no other alternative than life
on campus, I'd be very interested in your feelings about this.
Do you think that your own work in America was at all shaped by
your being part of an academic community?"
A by Nabokov.
"I find criticism most instructive when an expert proves to
me that my facts or my grammar are wrong. An academic career is
especially helpful to writers in two ways: 1) easy access to
magnificent libraries and 2) long vacations. There is, of course
the business of teaching, but old professors have young
instructors to correct examination papers for them, and young
instructors, authors in their own right, are followed by
admiring glances along the corridors of Vanity-Hall. Otherwise,
our greatest rewards, such as the reverberations of our minds
in such minds as vibrate responsively in later years, force
novelist-teachers to nurse lucidity and honesty of style in
their lectures."
Hope that helps.
If not, nothing ever will.
As far as I am concerned anyway.
Ta-ra for now.
Machiavelli writes how if one wishes to tear someone else down, one must attack them for their virtues and not their vices, and sow the seeds of doubt; by doing this, you can reduce someone to nothing. If someone is brave, call them a coward. If they are honest, inform everyone of their deceit. You demonstrated this fairly well, by trying to ask someone who presents facts and cites the historical record as he makes connections to our present history how any of this actually "equates" or is connected, and by trying to put into doubt the education and qualifications of someone who gives a reader the impression of being educated and knowledgeable.
However, if you want your Machiavellianism to be successful, you need to work on your writing and try to be a bit more succinct. If you had omitted half of your post, it might have conveyed its message better, but as it is, it comes across as rambling, and doesn't work very well to discredit your opponent the way you hoped. It's a tough read, rather than an easy one like David Gosselin's fine posts, which are long and yet easy reading. The lack of coherently expressed meaning and ideas in your post unfortunately does more to discredit yourself than your opponent, who you try to criticise for their coherently expressed meaning and ideas. The difficulty in skimming your post and the excessive use of spacing, new lines, and quotes in it, could make one miss the more poetic lines, which could have aroused a reader's attention, like whatever you were writing about the "sudden erection of [David Gosselin's] small dorsal hairs." A fascinating Latinate description of goosebumps, despite it failing to convey an impression of being an educated, erudite literary critic, who is merely dispelling proletarian sophistry.
Unfortunately, I can only give you a C+ on this one, and I will have to forward your post and this review to your team leader at the DIA. I recommend rereading the works of Machiavelli, but before you do and risk getting caught up with how flowery his beautiful medieval Italian writing may sound, have a quick read of George Orwell's famous "Politics and the English Language" essay, if you would like to better avoid using words that will only convince the reader of the opposite of what you intend to; especially these days.
Hope that helps. If not, as far as I'm concerned, nothing ever will. Ta-ta for now!
@Emma M.
Brava, Emma, BRAVA ! *Great Post !
Thank you for your outstandingly superior and shamelessly condescending reply of sorts to my comment, which was not addressed to you.
Needless to say, your blatantly intellectually dishonest rant attacking me for the crimes I never committed amounts to complete and utter nonsense of the crudest, most brazen kind imaginable.
I certainly intend to raise the issue of your unrestrained antisocial behaviour with the owner of this site, whom I admire tremendously.
It is apparent that you never actually read in full or indeed understood my reply to Monsieur David Gosselin.
The obvious questions are - do you seriously think that David Gosselin is unable to stand up or even speak for himself? How much is he paying you for trolling me, or do you operate voluntarily out of a burning desire to attack someone for the sake of projecting your own apparent insecurity (or moderate to severe mental health difficulties in strictly clinical terms) on innocent passers-by who in your not exceedingly sophisticated view couldn't or wouldn't dare to fight back?
Just out of curiosity, have you by any chance graduated from the same educational establishment as Monsieur David Gosselin, or did you study under his direction or willful misdirection it is most likely to be? Or perhaps you were or still are involved in a more personal relationship with your former professor/lecturer/tutor or personal mentor it might be?
Incidentally, I would not find it difficult to quote Machiavelli from memory after each and every sentence of your hapless little essay and in relation to a similarly confused "comment" of sorts that you are attempting to defend with such nothing short of outlandish and truly hilarious gusto.
As for the ever so ubiquitous George Orwell, it is common knowledge that he was the MOST shining example of brazenly extreme hypocrisy, unadulterated cynicism and blatant intellectual dishonesty Humanity has ever known.
Suffice to say that he shopped and grassed on his fellow writers, thinkers and intellectuals by their dozens, if not hundreds, to MI5, MI6 and various other affiliated British state security vermin who effectively controlled The Great British society at the time. Or perhaps Orwell's backstabbing background empowered you to have the audacity to be so openly abusive towards me?
Incidentally, Nabokov on Freudism:
"Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?
A. Have I been what?
Subjected to psychoanalytical examination.
A. Why, good God?
In order to see how it is done. Some critics have felt that your barbed comments about the fashionability of Freudianism, as practised by American analysts, suggest a contempt based upon familiarity.
A. Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too silly and disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke. Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick."
Hope that helps, if not - have a VERY nice day.
Contrary to the popular misconception, "the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick" usually do anyway.
Further introductory reading on the most common and likely causes of your significantly less than impressive diatribe directed at me, if I may:
https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Deviant_Behavior
Gosselin likes to hear the sound of his own writing. Much fury, signifying everything and nothing simultaneously.
Couldn't agree with you more.
Modernity as Conspiracy. A narrative template that's all too easily granted credibility.
Like it or not- there are many aspects that I wish were not part of it- Modernity is about as much of a conspiracy as the ocean.
"The suit up in Canada comes to mind where Dr Cameron was doing some horrible, Mengele type, shit to innocent people"
Still waiting on Marvel Studios' ALPHA FLIGHT movie. John Byrne and Bill Mantlo dug deep into this shit back in the '80s.
I really miss the days when mainstream superhero comic books from both Marvel and DC were tawdry and transgressive. The corporate masters were not paying close attention. Now it's all IP-driven CGI movies.
The corporate masters were too busy in the throes of utter hedonism to notice. That was the decadent age. Now, it's decay.
The whole thing stinks.
Jacob's Ladder is a favorite of mine that also dug into that cesspit. I also enjoy the deleted ending with the Lovecraftian critter digging through the ceiling.
I think Allen Dulles got many of his more freakish mind game ideas when he spent an extensive time hanging out with Carl Jung. Jung also had his shadow side.
Dulles & Kennedy butted heads.
Kennedy took a dirt nap.
I'm sure the two incidents aren't connected in any way, shape or form.
There is actually some great research on the Permindex international assassination bureaus and the Montreal connection, which is a continuation of the work DA Jim Garrison did with his “On the Trail of the Assassins.”
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/canadianpatriot.org/2019/11/22/montreals-permindex-and-the-deep-state-plot-to-kill-kennedy/amp/
To quote from the piece:
“In spite of that lack of full de-classification, enough evidence has been uncovered over the years, largely spearheaded by the pioneering work of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in Stone’s production) who led in the only jury trial investigating the true killers in 1966. Garrison’s work didn’t stop at the trial which uncovered mountains of inconsistencies in the “official narrative” of a lone gunman promoted by the very CIA which Kennedy openly threatened to “splinter into a thousand pieces and scatter into the wind” after firing Allan Dulles.
“Garrison’s investigation continued until his death in 1992 and his discoveries led directly to a Montreal-based international assassination bureau set up by MI6 during WWII named Permindex and steered by Louis Mortimer Bloomfield- a character whose life is kept a mystery as letters and personal writings remain classified in Canada’s National Archives, in spite of their legal mandate to be made public 20 years after his 1984 death.”
I hope I am wrong, but I can't imagine any film being more convincing than the original "I swear by Apollo" by Don Gilmour:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1073479.I_swear_by_Apollo
Here's ALPHA FLIGHT, corny but fantastic in a way that only 1960s-80s superhero comics can be: https://bit.ly/3CypEDz
I like Jim Hudson ("Guardian")'s echelonment of his subordinates into "reliable" Alpha Flight ("they've mostly got their own lives"), "questionable" Beta Flight ("some are learning"), and "I don't know what to do here" Gamma Flight ("What's going to happen to Gamma Flight?") Hudson himself is an introverted geophysicist who is extremely ill-suited to run a superhero team, but the Canadian government makes him do it anyway. (Spoiler: He is later assassinated by an energy corporation.)
Marvel/Disney+, please hire me to write a spec script. I don't understand why all of these mentally ill Canadian characters are not as popular as the Avengers or the X-Men.
But Wolverine is both a mentally ill Canadian and an X-Man
[Comic Book Guy voice] ...and, to my point, Wolverine was originally in Alpha Flight. The Canadian government's Department H experimented on him and gave him his adamantium-laced skeleton and claws. There's a whole plotline in Claremont's '80s X-Men in which Alpha Flight invades the U.S. to abduct Wolverine from the X-Men (since he's Canadian government property) and they fight.
Anyway. I need to stop crapping up the comment section with irrelevant discussion of decades-old comic books (although one might make a tenuous argument that this fits into the "good people and bad people" theme of MT's article). Please don't encourage me further.
I just always thought it was funny that the Canadian government was one of the most evil organizations in the Marvel Universe; akin to HYDRA but more subtle.
"Make the cops look like corrupt pigs, make the criminals look like the good guys, undermine the spiritual and faith foundations of the society, promote .." It's frightening how fast this narrative has reared it's head. I was @ an 8 yr old's bdy party and a group of boys were running around playing "cops and robbers". Seems innocent enough until one younger boy (7ish) stopped to ask his Grandma "wait, the robbers are the good guys, right?". Unfortunately the grandma just said "well....." . It all feels so hopeless at times.
You accurately describe the way the system works, but I think you impute a level of intentionally in the ruling class that's rarely actually there. Not many people see, much less act on, the grand structure. Each person is chasing narrow self-interest, and has a narrow scope.
Once you see that the problem is the structure, not the actors, you see why revolutions fail. Eat the rich just leaves different rich people in place.
"....The promotion of Wokeness, CRT, these are literally play by play the kinds of ideologies that are intentionally inserted into society in order to force its collapse...."
Should read:
"The promotion of Wokeness, CRT, these are literally play by play the kinds of ideologies that are intentionally inserted into society in order to keep the Gosselin's of the world off the streets and occupied with manufacturing pseudo-profundities that can't be argued for or against or even properly understood insofar that they are the linguistic equivalents of creating the artificial debates and false binaries of the ideological subversion playbook that unless they submitted themselves and took on the collective guilts of war criminals people like Di Angelo and Kendi get book deals and they just think it’s because they must be doing something right, rather than pointing out that such ideological warfare is being deployed, it was a means of completely castrating the population emotionally and intellectually, with that said, the whole art of these covert operations is really about making it seem like it’s all normal, those within the higher echelons of military, media, policy-making are actually some of the most brainwashed and ideologically blind individuals there are like these are all just natural debates and ideas that have just come about on their own and made their way into the scripts of all the major highly controlled news networks in the world, entrenched academia etc…"
Internet guy-flies like you, Gosselin, are just as dependant on the strictures and structures of CRT-Woke bullshit as any tenured professor inside the nation's critical theory cat clubs and strip joints. Absent the CRT/Woke universe, you'd be relegated to composing villanelles in Old Norse on the sex lives of unicorn jockeys and leprechaun-eunuchs. Which is to say that you, too, are but a pole dancer at the Kendi-DeAngelo Adult Lounge. Perhaps not a headliner yet, but looking sexier and sexier with every "rewriting of American history." Mazel tov.
For an editorial correction, that's a long-ass sentence
Dear Aunt Martha,
Have you listened to the presentation on ideological subversion given by the former KGB agent Yuri Besmenov?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE
He lists the following points as means of undermining the foundations of the state:
“Make the cops look like corrupt pigs, make the criminals look like the good guys, undermine the spiritual traditions and faith foundations of the society, promote other artificial cults and ideologies to replace them, and yes, encourage people to study useless subjects and get useless degrees, discourage the study of practical and scientific work.”
That doesn’t sound familiar? Yuri outlined how it was literally his job to promote these ideas.
I could be wrong, but I think the continued suggestion that bat shit crazy ideas like CRT have just managed to miraculously penetrate the boardrooms of the largest corporations, the most established universities, and the corridors of the greatest government powers thanks to the intellectual prowess of a few academics is really that sound. How these kind of things are actually spread is definitely an interesting phenomenon.
How do you explain the constant amplification of these ideas by the main stream media? As Caitlin Johnstone recently wrote, “The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media, Now it Is the Media”:
“Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called "Bountygate" story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.
"One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed 'intelligence officials') say today that it was a CIA claim," Greenwald tweeted. "So media outlets - again - repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all."
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-cia-used-to-infiltrate-the-media
This is just standard protocol for the MSM at this point. Much of the talking points are predestined. The talking heads and anchors are t actually smart enough the manage the kind of narrative war required. The MSM is simply an extension of the intel establishment’s propaganda infrastructure.
I would also recommend looking into “Project Mockingbird” and “MK-Ultra.” These were real CIA programs.
If we consider these and various other elements, I don’t think suggesting that CRT is part of a larger panoply of disinformation, ideological subversion and psychological warfare should really be that surprising. Maybe it’s not, but I don’t think discarding that possibility is necessarily correct. It could actually account for a lot of the craziness, and the seemingly master and artful way in which CRT has managed to insert itself into virtually every institution.
Regardless of what you think, I would recommend listening to Mr. Besmenov’s presentation because his job was to run ideological subversion. He had first hand experience, which most people don’t, naturally. People don’t have to agree, but they might want to hear about this stuff from people with first hand knowledge.
Intel agencies have been involved in this kind of psychological warfare for a long time. The only contention here is whether those tools are now directed at their domestic populations or not. If they are, I think the promotion of racial tensions and the destruction of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition using critical theory would be exhibit A. It would just mean that things really aren’t the way they appear at all.
The CIA has a long history of using culture as a means of subverting the minds of the population. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front that promoted Modernism and Abstract Impressionism throughout the post-war period.
As strange as that might sound, it’s true. But why would the CIA promote Modern Art? Sounds crazy doesn’t it?
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html%3famp
Not if people understand how ideological subversion works.
Ben Norton over at the Grayzone did some great coverage of the Cold War culture wars in a presentation he did on the Frances Stonor Saunders book “The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.” The CIA supported many of the leading literary magazines including Salon, Encounter, Paris Review, the list goes on.
I’d argue that much of the culture we see today, film, cinema, literature, is largely artificial, stilted, and promoted for other reasons that what they are ostensibly supposed to do, namely entertain and cultivate the minds of the population.
Here’s the description for Ben Norton’s Moderate Rebels episode, How the CIA cultivates a fake left: From the cultural cold war to intersectional imperialism:
“Ben Norton was invited to give this talk about the fake left and imperialism. He discusses how the CIA's "woke" recruitment ad is not new; it is rooted in an "intersectional imperialist" history going back to the first cold war, in which the CIA poured money into cultivating anti-communist, pro-imperialist progressive groups, using fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and billionaire-funded foundations like Ford and Rockefeller.
Ben goes through the book "The Cultural Cold War," and talks about supposed "leftist" CIA assets like feminist leader Gloria Steinem and Trotskyite civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, then analyzes examples of astroturfed, Nonprofit Industrial Complex-backed pseudo-left campaigns in the US, Western Europe, and Latin America.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rMap-6KxQJI
We live in interesting times.
"The CIA has a long history of using culture as a means of subverting the minds of the population. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front that promoted Modernism and Abstract Impressionism throughout the post-war period.
As strange as that might sound, it’s true. But why would the CIA promote Modern Art? Sounds crazy doesn’t it?"
The main thrust of that effort was directed as the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. As it happens, many of the foremost pioneers of those movements were Russian painters of the early 20th century who ended up being purged by Josef Stalin. It sounds to me as if you and Stalin are on the same page in that regard.
Martin Cruz Smith based a quite erudite and entertaining novel on that history, entitled Red Square. Good summer reading.
Best review of Lolita I've ever read.
Really deep writing, bringing up a lot of connections that I managed to follow despite not having read Lolita (or any other Nabokov.) Nabokov has been recommended to me repeatedly over the years, but that review is prompting me to actually get around to reading something by him.
"It’s no different than the Anglo-American intel networks’ “de-nazification” of Germany program run after WWII where Germans were essentially told that what happened happened because there was something innate inside them, something evil, and that unless they submitted themselves and took on the collective guilts of war criminals, and passed it on to the future generations, the same horrors would occur again, because of them. It was a means of completely castrating the population emotionally and intellectually using shame."
That's nonsensical. Do the Germans of today appear emotionally and intellectually "completely castrated" to you? Or do you just not like the fact that they're no longer so carried away by a sense of nationalism that they feel compelled to reify it as biological racial 'Aryan supremacy'?
You're upset that the Germans ended up suffering terribly from a war was started by a sociopathic leader who was supported by the vast majority of the German population at the time of the war's outset?
De-Nazification was a lot less punitive than a lot of other terms of surrender imposed by victors in other conflicts. In the material sense, it was certainly less punitive than the Treaty of Versailles imposed after World War One. "De-Nazification" didn't stop Reinhard Gehlen from serving as director of the BND, or Franz Josef Strauss from serving as Defense Minister, or Kurt Kiesinger from serving as Chancellor.
If you want to talk about Germany, I suggest you read the latest pieces by CJ Hopkins, who is based in Germany.
To quote something from his latest piece:
“My name is CJ Hopkins. I live in Germany. I am banned from eating at restaurants, travelling by plane or train, attending religious ceremonies, school, cultural events, and otherwise participating in society, because I refuse to convert to the official new ideology. #NewNormal”
Sound to you like a society that remembers its history, or one where most people are afraid to be caught saying the wrong thing, and instead just go along to get along?
https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/the-propaganda-war-part-ii
And for the record, the Nazi war machine was made possible by Anglo-American financiers who played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power. When Hitler’s party was going bankrupt in the early thirties, and also already contemplating suicide, he was bailed out by a loan made by Prescott Bush, George Bush Jr.’s grandfather through Brown Brothers Harriman.
Hitler modelled his eugenics program on the US sterilization policies, which were pushed by much of the Wall Street elite.
There is also a book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. The Anglo-American intelligence and financial establishment is what actually made Hitler possible. The approach is always to support and prop up the kind of insane puppets who is not afraid to do the unthinkable. That was why Hitler became their guy.
In fact, there was an attempt to run a fascist coup in the USA to establish the same kind of dictatorship. The plot was exposed and foiled by General Smedley Butler.
Did you know that?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/hyperinflation-fascism-war-new-world-order-may-defeated-once-more/5724353
Hitler had the backing of the Bank of England, the Bank of International settlements, and much of both the British and American financial establishment.
Those same financial networks exist still to this day.
You can't leave out the Maoist connection with Berkeley BLM roots
Everything is cultural revolution playbook
Maoism as ARG, perhaps. The fatuity factor is not to be underestimated there.
You are so on. And the part about 150 corporations still has me laughing!
Yeah, well one person's long winded is another reader's fascinating piece. So there. Great comment, esp your ending 'no longer see the fucking banana'. In the spirit of A Christmas Story: A++++++++++++++++....
Thanks. I actually wanted to use Obama's birthday bash as an illustration but I self censored because equating Barack & bananas might be...ahem...seen as racist.
Because Obama, with 9000 drone strikes and an estimated 80% killing innocent bystanders rate, probably makes him the most prolific serial killer in American history. His bragging self own of his murder skills pushes him firmly into sociopath territory. Then when you add in his 8 years of banker blow jobs & hand jobs you have a president who is about as left as my right hand.
Yet arch lefty, antiwar blather spewer and hater of Republicans, Eddie Vedder & his band, was originally scheduled to offer up a rocking Happy Birthday for Henry Lee Obama, only bowing out when the bash was scaled back.
Pearl Jam's website lists their Vitalogy Foundation's aims as, "Vitalogy elevates the voices of overlooked groups and seeks opportunities to support approaches that value people’s minds, bodies, and souls." I wonder if the act of violently turning folk's minds & bodies into souls also counts. Evidently it does.
No doubt that other arch lefty, antiwar blather spewer and hater of Republicans, Bruce Cringesteen was also in attendance since Henry Lee & Cringesteen are about to publish a book they co-authored.
Obviously Vedder & Cringesteen can't see the fucking banana either.
I wrote a critique of that party on my sub. Most views I've had yet. And I've gotten some of my first condemnation from leftists. Lol. Whatever. The satirical comment on the post is not one of them. He's a friend.
...but NYT and Jim Acosta said that Obama and party was "sophisticated" so they're excused.....after all we are just plebeian..
hahaa a sophisticated collection of sociopaths and serial killers. How apropos.
John Carpenter's THEY LIVE (1988)
Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY (1989)
I remain amazed at how Hollywood allowed this kind of cultural critique deep into the Reagan years. Now? Crickets.
Now? CGI fakery "epics" with no plot line that could offend anyone in most of the world's movie market like some kind of everyflavor ice cream. Corporate partnerships have closed out anything not desirable.
They Live is one of my all time faves. For real.
I saw the Piper bio on A&E a few weeks ago. Do you remember Piper's ubiquitous leather jackets? They were kevlar lined because fans tried to kill him. He'd been stabbed a few times. Once fairly seriously. He was rushed to the hospital by Sgt. Slaughter.
I think most of the New Age can be attributed to intelligence agencies. Take a place like Findhorn, that was founded by Eileen Caddy. Caddy, who had said she was hearing an inner voice, was groomed by British Intelligence, long considered a valuable intelligence partner of the US, when she was isolated by her second husband, Peter Caddy, at the Scottish island of Mull.
This from Quest magazine:
"Eileen was subjected to what appears to be nothing other than a classical (Chinese/Korean-type) brainwashing procedure -- isolation, sleep deprivation, prolonged maintenance of painful positions, ego-devastating disparagement, etc. -- and was possibly given drugs as well.
This followed a previous, aborted, less intense episode which culminated in a suicide attempt by Eileen. Before the second, more intense procedure was performed Eileen refused to believe the “voice” was God apparently because her upbringing was strictly Protestant. Afterwards she accepted it.
The British military psychologists were at that time beginning to write the book on an infant field of research: personality testing and assessment. Whether Eileen scored high on tests or whether her husband just wanted to dump her is unknown. Also, before her first marriage, she and her brothers had run an inn catering to the RAF -- so she was a known entity.
In any event it appears that she was picked for some reason, and then RAF Officer, Peter Caddy, procured and developed her, exploiting her marital dissatisfaction. And it was not long (1954) until she was beginning to hear an inter-cerebral “voice” which identified itself as “God.”
Peter encouraged her to listen and accept by regaling her with tales of his own purported spiritual contact years earlier in Jerusalem, when a “voice” -- so he claimed -- had spoken to him."
There are also more current iterations that stink of intelligence operations.
You have faith healer John of God in Brazil. Oprah featured him. She said that when she met him she almost fainted. Said her visit to his compound humbled her. After her blessing John of God's popularity, already quite large, became even larger.
Currently there are 600 allegations of rape against him. There are also accusations that he was spiriting young girls away to secluded "baby farms" where he would impregnate them. When the baby was born he'd sell it on the international market.
Also Waco is back in the game with Robert Chipman's nomination to head the ATF and the fact that another religious cult of dubious provenance has taken up residence there.
A cult, formerly known as World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, but now known as the Rod of Iron Ministries. has made the AR-15 the centerpiece of their beliefs.
It is an offshoot of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church headed by one of Moon's sons. Moon has an extensive history working with US intelligence. His sons church has embraced Trump in a big way.
Make of that what you will.
> bash was scaled back
Looked like that was just a media propaganda and nothing was scaled back:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9869959/John-Legend-Chrissy-Teigen-Dwyane-Wade-arrive-Marthas-Vineyard-Obamas-birthday-bash.html
And if this is what's considered scaled back, then I don't know what the real scale was :s
What can you say about a guy who has already been elected President twice and stays in DC to clean up on the money. Hello ...???!
Chrissie Teigan trying to channel Marilyn Munroe in Kennedy territory must have brought back some fond memories.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-9873409/Chrissy-Teigen-glams-Obamas-birthday-bash-channels-Marilyn-Monroe-singing-Happy-Birthday.html
That "self-censoring" is exactly the outcome for which they strive. Not knocking ya - we all do it. We all just need to work to recognize it.
Oh Spiderbaby you said a mouthful there. They don't care about the majority of Syrians or the worst refugee crisis in history which nearly destabilized Europe -- and funding AQ and ISIS who don't even take POWs (let's face it, even the Nazis had POW camps). And the present admin sort of seems to start in the same old direction on that particular foreign policy.
I think that Joe Bob sent a heavily armed convoy into Syria on Inauguration Day.
I also seem to remember hearing a snippet of leaked audio from an investor's meeting that occurred right after Trump announced that he wanted to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan. The man speaking was reassuring the investors that they shouldn't worry because there would always be a war somewhere.
Nuland was recently questioned on Capitol Hill. When it came to Erdogan arming Turkmen extremists (you know, like the jihadists he sent to Armenia recently to "help" Azerbaijan along with his drones), "Well, they can do a service by pushing back on Assad ... " oh yeah, big service to the world, got it.
We just had the Captive Nations Week Summit in July, sponsored by the Victims Of Communism Memorial Foundation. The VOC, like Captive Nations Week itself, is closely connected to the infamous World Anti-Communist League (WACL), an endlessly fascinating netherworld of diehard fascists, international gangsters, and "former" intelligence and military officers the world over.
The attendees were the usual suspects of Neo-cons, Neo-libs, spooks, spies, strippers & fan dancers. Okay, the last two groups weren't there, but they should have been.
Despite the fact that an unrepentant Nazi collaborator was instrumental in crafting the Captive Nations Week that this event was celebrating, President Joe Biden had few qualms about endorsing it. Indeed, everyone in attendance got a commemorative letter from the president honoring the event.
One of my favorite attendees was Rushan Abbas. Abbas is a Uyghur American activist, and one of the foremost critics of the Uyghur genocide allegedly being carried out in China. I say allegedly, as claims of genocide there are highly controversial, to put it mildly. In fact, the VOC has been at the forefront of pushing these claims.
Coincidentally Abbas also served as a translator during the interrogation of Uyghur men held at Guantanamo Bay, which makes me wonder who side she is on, if there are even anything as quaint as "sides" anymore.
Oddly enough, whether an attendee was Democrat or Republican, Neo-Con or Neo-Lib, they all agreed on regime change for Cuba, Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran & Syria. In fact, the only real difference between them on these matters is the extent to which LGBTQ+ rights should be emphasized when regime change is advocated.
It appears that America's upper management is in complete goose-step...ooops...I mean lockstep while the lower echelons like us are kept at each others throats. Weird, huh?
To paraphrase George Carlin, it is indeed one big club and we ain't in it.
Sorry, was at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing
"Obama, with 9000 drone strikes and an estimated 80% killing innocent bystanders rate, probably makes him the most prolific serial killer in American history. His bragging self own of his murder skills pushes him firmly into sociopath territory."
I always wondered exactly who Bad Religion were targeting with this song. Maybe it was prophetic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeNHMivf68c
Thanks for the video. I used to like Bad Religion. Since everything switched to Spotify and my local radio station's playlist stopped progressing passed 1995 or so, I don't hear a lot of new music unless I specifically hunt for it.
Sadly there are far too many candidates that fit that song's title.
In my opinion BR tapered off badly (ha) c. 2000, but from about 1988-95 they were at the height of their powers. I especially like "(You Are) The Government" and "American Jesus" -- bookends of the classic era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxGVETwmPr8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moPY9_wqH-8
I admit to liking Greg Graffin's solo folk stuff though.
"no longer discern reality"
It doesn't help when this happens: A and B argue. B leaves. A finds and talks to a policeman.
And the media writes: A and B argued. They went to a policeman and told him they had argued with a man who had since left.
WTF? Was there a C who was with A? Did A and B argue with C?
That's journalism in the brave new world of "they" replacing "he" and "she." And that's a real example I read just this past weekend. I'll be damned if I understand how the public can be expected to know the "preferred pronouns" of everyone who might appear in a newspaper article.
This is my objection to using "they" for the singular gender-not-specified: it causes needless confusion. There are a number of concocted words proposed for the purpose - I just saw "herm" used. One was really funny, but I've forgotten it.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to introduce a completely new word, so apparently, for now, we're going down the easy path. A note: any writer who leaves the confusion standing is incompetent, and so is "their" editor.
Aha - I remembered the funny one: it was in Klingon, hence guttural and unpronounceable. But anything short would do. There are languages that do have the missing pronouns; maybe we could thank them nicely and appropriate one.
That's a great point: "I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention."
That's why the Amazon etc.. funding for BLM and Antifa is such a smart money.
"I couldn't help wondering how corporations must be truly loving this time. As long as their crimes don't have a skin color or a political affiliation no one will pay attention. As long as they put the required number of minorities along with the occasional rainbow flag in their ads they instantly become "part of the solution. The news is, much like the dinosaurs, completely extinct, at least as far as TV news goes."
-- Well said
You don't need a lab full of assistants and apparati: "researchers were trying to discern if seeing is really believing or do we tend to see what what we believe we're going to see irregardless of what's actually there."
You can get some interesting results all by your lonesome, as Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by just watching". See "Cornflake" at
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/cornflake
As I sort of point out, what this shows at the individual, single perception level scales up to the whole shebang.
Don't disagree. I observe plenty.
At my weekend job there was a male nurse who I used to chat to regularly. He was an avowed Republican. I wasn't. We regularly talked politics. We never got in a fist fight, attempted to murder each other or cancel each other. He changed my mind on some things. I changed his mind. Y'know like adults.
He was always outspoken about the problematic nature of masks. Didn't get the vaccine. Criticized my employer's entirely inane response to Covid.
Then one day, due to a family emergency, he left 15 minutes early without asking permission. He was terminated.
Now, as context, you have to understand that the facility is egregiously short staffed. Nurses violate rules constantly. Rarely receiving a reprimand.
For example, his replacement is a totally unhinged liberal woman who has repeatedly given clients the wrong meds, caused conflict & unrest in every assignment she's had and, more importantly, uses enemas on the clients to annoy staff she doesn't like. In other words, she unnecessarily shoves an enema tube up a mentally challenged client's ass as a demented form of revenge porn. One nurse described her as a Shit Nazi. Yet she has been there for 8 years.
There is no sane explanation for this dichotomy.
Oh yeah, she is an outspoken hater of Republicans. If she gets even a whiff of the Republican about staff, she shrieks insanely at them.
I know this because once I found out the details of her insanity, I borrowed a MAGA hat off of a friend and I wear it every weekend. I also make sure FOX is on whenever she's in the building. She goes ballistic, sputtering inane nonsense like it was pearls of wisdom. I smile & wave. She quickly exits the building in a huff. I chuckle to myself.
I figure that it's the least I can do for my canned friend.
I also figure that I'm not far away from being tarred with some invented allegation which is why I keep a small digital recorder in my pocket, only turning it on when crazy girl is in the house. At the very least I'll be able to shove my employer's hypocrisy in their face. Right before they can me. Time will tell.
Good Luck - do you have a blog ? - I would read it.
No. My internet presence, other than here, is zero.
I had one years ago. The only useful fact I learned was whenever I'd post a photo of a hot girl in a bikini or totally nude, I'd get a shit load of hits from Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Make of that what you will.
Spider BABY - truth or fiction - you deserve a following of your own.
Hear hear!
Spiderbaby, that story is gold. I even sent it to my daughter, who is a nurse (and a Republican).
Sadly every word is true. You have no idea how much I wish it wasn't.
Spiderbaby, I think I love you
Good luck.
Thanks. I have a pretty good rep there. We'll see.
The time for polite discourse and problem solving is long past. We'll see people fighting it out soon enough as it all comes crashing down.
Know what? Who cares?
What's a bunch of barbarism compared to this thinly veiled version of the same?
One could argue that we're already IN the next Dark Age... the one Sagan warned us all about. Reason was abandoned long ago, and it's all witch hunts and lynching's nowadays.
Dammit.. I fucking HATE when people misuse apostrophes. My phone autocorrected "lynchings". Nice work, Google. Keep it up.
@Spiderbaby
*Wonderfully well written ! Yes. I was apparently in college about the same time that you were. Back when scientists were discovering and *proving the fact that eye-witness accounts of *anything (especially anything involving emotion/trauma) were more often than not, *worthless for just the reason you have noted above.
Eye-witness accounts, long the "gold standard" of proof in Courts, we now know to be
the fabric of the human brain almost always "seeing" what it *expects to see, mostly according to the context of the experience.
People in jobs with backgrounds as trained observers do better than the general public at large, but even they cannot fully escape the way the human brain is wired to work.
Spiderbaby, I always enjoy reading your comments! Among the best.
I’ve listened to Yeonmi Park on JBP and JRE podcasts and something about her story just doesn’t feel right. I could be completely mistaken but my gut tells me it’s bs/exaggerated. I’m referring to her defection adventure not the mugging which I can unfortunately totally believe.
Doing zero research on it because I'm supposed to be trying to get work done, I think that she's changed the mugging story, and that her story contradicted what the cops recorded. She should avoid embellishing, if she wants to be credible.
I too listened to those podcasts and was skeptical of her defection story. But then I recalled all the stories we have heard from survivors of the holocaust -- the death marches barefoot through the snow, the escapes from the camps, just plain survival in circumstances where one should not have survived -- and I give Ms. Park the benefit of the doubt. I only doubted her story because it was incredible. (Also see, the Witold Pilecki report.)
Are people able to fly to NK, wander around and find out for themselves?
Can't comment on the defection story since I only saw the snippet describing the mugging. If I get the time I'll give the whole episode a listen. Maybe it's all invented bullshit & I'm the idiot who can't see the banana.
You spent the weekend bouncing back and forth between CNN and Fox? Why?
Since I'm bored & stuck waiting for my kid to wake up & help cut up a tree that didn't survive last night's storms, I will give you 32 hours of my weekend TV offerings in a nutshell. No need to thank me.
We'll start with movies.
One station played the 1st six Star Wars movies except they played them out of order. Sadly they're owned by Disney & fuck Disney so I don't partake.
Then the TV offered the 1st four Jaws movies except they played them backwards, 4 to 1, so the viewer could watch Sheriff Brody rise from the dead like a good ol' zombie shark hunter.
Lifetime had a series of Psycho movies. Oh, not the Hitchcock Psycho franchise just a series of movies with Psycho in the title. For example, Psycho Stripper & Psycho Gardner & Psycho Gynecologist. Good stuff if good actually means insipid.
The TV also offered up the Bourne films, skipping #1. I think it was still out partying in Cabo. They followed that with the John Wick franchise, also skipping #1. I'm sensing a pattern.
Another station offered up every Sharknado film. Sadly I've seen them all at least once. Don't judge. It's my burden.
That leaves us with actual TV shows. Let's see we had Blue Bloods. What can one say about Tom Selleck other than he has the emotional range of a large Winnebago. Luckily, these days, he looks like a large Winnebago. Seriously, Tom is amazing. What's amazing is how he's older than dirt yet there's not one gray hair in that oversized melon head of his. I picture a retinue of his handlers treating his head like a large pen nib as they invert Tom & dip his whole head into a melon sized dye-well. Using putty knives to scrape off the excess.
What is exactly is up with Commissioner Stormtrooper anyway? His kids are so psychologically beaten down & under his thumb they have to crawl back home every weekend for dinner. A dinner where the Commish & his Pops sit like demented Gremlins at either end of the table dispensing cop wisdom like dysfunctional oracles.
The only believable part is the father/son bond between Selleck & Wahlberg. It's believable primarily because Wahlberg has the emotional range of a large toaster oven so I could see them as being related.
Then we have the many Law & Order iterations. The less said about them the better.
We had NCIS in 2 versions. All I wonder when I watch any of them is how the Navy can keep putting ships to sea with all the dead & incarcerated sailors generated by the 3 iterations of this turkey.
Seinfeld was playing in a block but the only thing I wonder when watching Jerry is how brain damaged I had to be in the 90s to find him funny. These days it's just painful viewing.
Two & A Half Men was on but they were the Ashton Kushman version that is about as funny as an unexpected bowel movement on a street corner.
Big Bang Theory was also offered. That's the show where tiny elf sized scientists, who could apparently be beaten senseless by your average kindergarten student, show their plucky spunk as they maneuver the hot chicks into position for a good, emotionally fragile, dicking. It's about as funny as a yeast infection.
Then we had sports. I did spend 20 minutes watching something called Cornholing that involved 4 fat guys, some bean bags & an inclined board with a hole in it. You could call these guys athletes in the same sense you could call someone who did a keg stand & then passed out in a pile of dog shit an "athlete."
I won't detail the endless stream of annoyingly unfunny Madison Ave. ads that play between this wonderland of entertainment...ummm...wonder. Strangely none of them make me want to shop as much they make me want to hurl my work boot at the screen. Although I am hoping to see the Geico ad where the put upon and belittled guy snaps with a hand axe as he screams at Flo, "Bundle this you fucking bitch. Bundle this." I might give that a few views.
Oh yeah, I really do occasionally watch Iyania: Fix My Life. The old broad thinks she's Yoda. Quite amusing. It's also quite amusing how all the women are told they're queens(queens of what is never actually explained) while the young black men are forced to crawl through tubes(birth canal proxies?) as they recite all the ways they let the women in their life down. Great stuff if, by "great stuff," you mean bullshit masquerading as wisdom.
So there you go. A weekend of TV enjoyment for all. I probably left some out but my kid's done with his pancakes & I'm off to do some chainsawing.
So, are you glad you asked?
It’s baseball season, dude! Turn on a game. The best thing about baseball (other than my Dodgers) is that, as long as one team is getting hits and putting runners on base, there are no commercial breaks. You can go 20, 25, 30 minutes with no ads. And even when there are breaks, they’re really short, just because there isn’t much time between innings.
Or better yet, just turn the tv off.
Buddy, 16 hours in a silent room with just me, myself & I can get a bit...weird sometimes. I used to always bring a book but I got old & reading glasses are a pain to carry around. I've had pairs broken by clients having a bad day & needing someone to take it out on.
Actually this was just one weekend that I happened to spend a lot of time watching TV news. Call it comparison shopping. Neither side won my viewing dollars.
In the past, I probably would have just clicked on a ball game. That ended with the cardboard cutouts of people in the stands & the piped in fake crowd noise. Too much like a bad acid trip. Plus they've literally politicized every form of entertainment that folk would use to escape politics & the world. So sorry, I don't do sports anymore. Although, should they send me a check every month, I'd be more than happy to cheer along with everyone else.
I suppose I could also have watched the Olympics except that I don't care.
While everything up there was actually airing this passed weekend, I only typed it up because I'm an asshole. And I was bored.
As it looks now I will have other things to worry about other than TV viewing. One of our business's main clients informed my wife earlier that they haven't weathered the lockdowns very well. They're giving it till the end of the year to see if it turns around but they may close. That would be a significant income hit. Now, with talks of the return of harsher anti-Covid measures, the closing seems inevitable. Pre-lockdown the company was expanding as was our income. Add in the iffy nature of my weekend job & I foresee stress on the horizon. Weeeeeeeeee!! I suppose there's always heroin. Then again, Hunter S. once said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional,” so maybe I'll start a second career as the world's oldest social media influencer and champion of pronoun integrity.
Okay, well, there’s real fans in the stands now and no piped-in crowd noise, so your bad acid trip is over. As far as politics in baseball is concerned, the only political thing I’ve noticed is last August or September, when Orel Hershiser made a “We need law and order” comment during a Dodgers broadcast. Baseball’s about as apolitical as you can get.
I mean, honestly, I don’t give a fuck what you do. But if watching television was as hellish an experience for me as it sounds like it is for you, I’d just turn it off and crank some tunes or something. I’ll never understand this apparent compulsion of people to be super-pissed off about something that’s as easily remedied as just turning off the tv or getting off of social media or whatever. Simple solutions to easy problems really do exist.
e., I'm sorry it is none of that to me. It is Dr. Phil in blackface. It is attention seeking at its basest. These are conversations that should be private between therapist & client but instead are just another way that attention starved narcissists wallow in their own shit for attention on national TV.
I would sooner watch ducks molt.
At work. Worst cable package imaginable. Stations play same movies every freaking weekend. I tried to watch Iyania: Fix My Life but my eye's started to bleed. I actually only spent sections of the weekend bouncing. Some sections were spent moonwalking between CNN & FOX while other sections were spent ricocheting between CNN & FOX.
Then again maybe I'm a masochist & my hair shirt was in the laundry.
Damn e., you caught me. I'll have to work on the "secret" part a little harder.
Which side smears Mark Taibbi as a proto fascist?
Matt is never a topic anywhere that I've seen but I don't really look. I can speculate but everybody does that.
Never. Right.
Excellent long windedness I might add.
Great article again, Matt. One thing about Cuomo that should be mentioned is while groping a woman's breast at work is bad, launching a smear campaign against her when she complains reaches the true evil category.
Like Biden did to Tara Reade. Those two have a lot in common. They both get off on bullying and pushing the boundaries of their impunity.
Matt makes a good point about the moral failures we choose to focus on.
Cuomo's sex scandal is unsavory, but doesn't approach the sinister criminality of knowingly forcing retirement homes to accept Covid positive patients, writing a waiver for the companies doing this so they would not be held liable, lying about the number of people this policy killed, then writing a book about how you beat Covid-19. It's almost comical it's so sinister.
Likewise, in Biden's 48 years in the Senate not only is he directly responsible for promoting endless war, growing the surveillance state and a primary architect of mass incarceration in the US, but also had a history of supporting laws like the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) that shifted all the burden from the lender to the borrower. All this and we hear about Tara Read.
I don't mean to minimize their poor behavior towards women, but it's like singling out Mussolini for his parking tickets while in office. Our society seems more offended by words than deeds and offending people has become a worse crime than actually killing them.
It's not just Biden and Cuomo who have a lot in common. Those who focus on the performative over the criminal have a lot on common as well.
The significant difference is that a sex abuse or similar allegation can, usually, be contained to the individual. If people started looking at Cuomo's COVID policies there are a string of other Governors (D) that implemented similar policies, as well as questions to be raised about why his staff didn't object. Focusing on sex abuse is a way of containing the damage.
https://www.theonion.com/cuomo-increasingly-desperate-to-shift-focus-back-onto-n-1847423866
I love The Onion.
Thanks for the laugh.
"You are dumb."™®
"Make checks payable to "The Onion." ("America's Finest News source).
Who knew then that one day those words would be literally true?
I know. That's an important part of the context of this. But my comment about Biden goes to the question of why Cuomo and why now? Cuomo's behavior is in every way, including all those mentioned, are normal. So what's going on? Why did the party decide to get rid of him and launch the investigation?
Just a guess here. Al Franken got tko'd not because of one photo or accuser, but all of the others who came out of the woodwork. As well as the fact that some Dems were afraid that there were more on deck.
The Dems were already all in with Biden. But it seemed that there was only one accuser. And she was a bit dodgy, and a Bernie supporter (as am I), so they had cover.
Cuomo has a lot of accusers. The hypocricy of the Dems hits limits when it comes to losing a major seat. Whether that would be the NY governor's office, or potus.
Once accuser came forwards in defiance of the party, knowing what would happen. If an investigation against Biden had been conducted with suitable protection for accusers, I think there would have been plenty. He has a rep.
But anyway, my point is that it seems likely the party decided to ditch Cuomo for other reasons and used these scandals to do it (idk why or why now). And I think that even further devalues the cause of the millions of people who have to put up with creeps, bullies, gropers, quid-pro-quoers etc. at work.
I honestly have no idea about Biden. There are certainly enough creepy pictures of him on the interwebs. Do i think he's a pedo? Actually, i don't, but who knows. Do i think he has a major boundary issue. You betcha. Which is majorly problematic. But while unwanted hair sniffing and shoulder rubs are gross, it's still a ways from boob grabbing.
Timing was Franken’s enemy. It was in the beginning of the metoo trash. Today he would be up 20 points in his bid for reelection.
Laws only work when they are enforced. The swamp picks and chooses what and when to enforce.
They could afford to throw him under the bus, they had a Dem governor to pick his replacement. Guy had presidential ambitions too, but wasn't going to be annointed. Ultimately no great loss.
My guess would be to look to the NY AG's office to see if there's a beef. I don't see a benefit to "the party", i.e . ruling class as a whole, that would be a reason to push this now.
The progressive wing of the Dem party has always hated the machine wing. And as that machine wing pulled all hands on deck to get rid of Trump, they are now paying the piper, in that all of those progressives who were put in office are now looking for blood and to advance the progressive agenda.
As Matt points out, there are only a couple of semi-serious allegations here, most fall into the same category that the allegations against Trump fell, unsubstantiated BS. But there is blood in the water, and you never let a crisis go to waste.
Don't stop to think that Cuomo, if his reputation is left (ahem) unmolested, would be a potential candidate for 2024, and the party knows it. They want to clear the deck now.
If Trump is riding a wave of MAGA again, and Joe has more than one piece of breakfast on his face... the Dems will need an alpha male to slug it out with the Donald. Cuomo is one of the few with the (D) next to his name who could dish it out as well as take it.
I think the total overkill of Nina Turner shows there is no such piper. Progressives who havent been coopted have been neutered.
Quite sadly, i agree.
With the reelection of the squaddies, the takeover of most blue wall AG and DAs, we are far, far from rid of the progressive menace.
Indeed, Leticia James who is running this operation is one of their "finest" members.
Focusing on the performative is by design - doing it on the criminal part would necessarily start conversation not about the failings of particular human but the failings and injustices of the system as a whole.
Areslent - Your commentary is excellent. It is by design -how else could it be that a crime is no longer a crime, and a non-crime is a crime ? People entertain insane rationalizations all day long, and therefor no longer have plain common sense. My 5$ is about to run out, but I am glad to find people like yourself posting here. These are not matters of entertainment, and we do not need/want gate keepers.
many are starting to see that these are matters of objective fact and morality - and beginning to realize it is not about being on one side or another. Bless you.
And Bill Clinton before them, arguably quite a bit worse than Biden and Cuomo. Yet he reigns as a Democratic Party elder statesman.
And don't forget his wife, who was front and center on smearing his accusers.
As a Leftist, my wake-up call about the duplicity of Dems occurred back in 1994 when "esteemed" Rep. Pat Schroeder repeated Jim Carville's line about "waving a dollar bill through a trailer park" after Paula Jones came forward with her accusation. Certainly as obscene as many things Republicans have been crucified for.
Let's aim for some balance, eh? It's not just Ds that hike the Appalachian trail. And I'm sure that more than one R senator has a wide stance.
How come it's more funny when Rs are caught?
I tried to explain to many Democratic friends - not stupid people at all, otherwise pretty smart ones - back in '16 about how nauseatingly hypocritical it was for Hillary Clinton to say "believe all women" about Donald Trump, but not about her husband. They just couldn't make that connection, or understand that it was the exact same energy. At that point i really totally despaired of the ability for critical thinking of our Democratic electorate. If they had admitted - yeah, but Trump, so she gets a pass on Bill here - i could have at least mustered a scintilla of respect.
Probably because Republicans used to be the ones obsessed with screeching about sexual purity.
How the tables have turned.
Ya know, now that I'm in my 60's I find myself, out of necessity, "taking a wide stance" to urinate (Prostate troubles). Makes me think back on that accusation with a bit of rueful understanding, or at least that it wasn't entirely a silly defence.
And murdering Gaddafi, so now Libya is a free-for-all with open slave markets and yet another portal for a gargantuan refugee crisis.
But but but what about any criticism of her is sexist!!!
Cry harder, lib ;)
Clinton is a rapist.
Maybe. Maybe not. Idk. But he liked to drop bombs on foreigners to distract the media from his wee willie.
Thank you !! There are also bipartisan taboo themes though.
Much reported, including Ed Snowden "Topic of this year – Pegasus, etc.", is disclosure of continuous over time surveillance ability of all smart-phones of all conversations and pin-point location-accuracy even when phone is turned off.
Therefore, certainly many governments (certainly of Israel and the US) know EXACTLY and for ALL Epstein's associates and "guests" -- who, when, where, how long, and why they were with pedophile Epstein !! Yet we still don't know, after all this time, for example, even what Epstein's multiple passports show.
As courageous Eric Weinstein stated -- Epstein was "a construct" - by one or more intelligence services. And – the buck for these spywares for authoritarian governments stops -- at Israel apartheid government.
No, man, phone possession isn't like being physically microchipped.
If street drug dealers know how to use burner phones, and most people with a subscription to Wired magazine know what a Faraday cage is, it's easy to figure out that if someone really NEEDS to go out of the loop of being physically tracked by the phone(s) associated with their personal ownership, there are ways to effectively confound that sort of remote surveillance.
Since i brought up physical microchipping: it's a much more difficult proposition than the ignorant assume; the notion of "GPS nanochips" infused into the human circulatory system without prompting a stroke or an immune reaction- or operating without a power supply- is Spec-Fi at its worst. Look up the Inverse Square Law; there's no way around it. Without a sufficiently ample power supply for the transmitter chip, you got nothing. No grid can pick up the signal, not even 5G. Whatever the legit objections to 5G might be, humans being bugged by "nanochips" is not one of them. The power supply is the sticking point for all sorts of technologies, because Moore's Law does not apply to it. Moore's "Law" (not really a law) is a shorthand way of describing the exponential advances in the sophistication of digital technology- but that's entirely about switching transistors. Not power transistors, or any other sort of power supply. There's no way to shrink power supplies, storage capacitors, and power transistors down to the size of a grain of salt. Not now, not on the horizon. I mean, never say never; but I think science will unlock the mysteries of antigravity and nuclear fusion before Moore's Law applies to electrical power generation and storage.
There are of course microchips being used to identify pets- one of them is branded as the "NanoCHIP", despite the fact that it's fairly large in comparison to true nanochip technology; the NanoCHIP is about the size of a grain of rice. It's implanted subdermally or subcutaneously, under the surface of the skin, not in the circulatory system. Pet microchips provide identification only, in response to being wanded by a receiver; they are not tracking devices.
I don’t think Clinton is worse than Cuomo. Cuomo seems to be purely ass whereas Clinton does seem to be a little better.
I want to smell your hair Tom
Please change the tag--very annoying.
So the Clinton’s attained pure evil
around 1991? I would agree. But 30 yrs later they are still respected leaders of the establishment. Should make us think on what our leader class really is.
Well, not as evil as killing thousands of the elderly, but I take your point.
Does this apply to Trump? https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/trumps-distorted-attacks-on-his-accusers
Using factcheck as a source is like using cnn or msnbc as a source for russiagate nonsense.
Factcheck? LOL. Even if you trust this political propaganda site, there are lightyears of difference between off-hand unspecified counterclaims & the leaking of confidential damaging documents. You seriously can't see that?
One day Matt will realize that the reason The Woke confuse him so much and why Nabokov, Humbert and Lolita have not been canceled is that The Woke are villains. They identify with the evil, the destruction of innocence and the exertion of power. He's still thill thinking of them as misguided silly people, which of course many of them are, but the core group that drives them and guides their thinking and actions are neither silly nor misguided. They are intentional and self-aware in their corrosiveness. These type of people are not some new species. They have always existed in some place or position of power, reveling in the pain and suffering and collapse they cause. Torquemada would understand Humbert perfectly.
Too simple. Their model is not Torquemada, but Calvin. They have rediscovered original sin, and even total depravity. But it is limited to white folks, or more accurately people not on the official victim list. The issiues are deep, and even the religious among us seem to have lost the ability to think about them intelligently.
I don't entirely disagree though I think the same type of person and psychopathology is behind both. What makes them so slippery is that the details hardly matter. It doesn't really matter who is victimized as long as someone is victimized and made to suffer. It's sadism, essentially. The various ideologies and groups and victims are completely interchangeable and utilitarian. What is currently happening, IMO is that the technology of the internet has done what it does and allowed small groups of people to find others like them and network and band together to gain influence. It's a "community" of sadists.
"What is currently happening, IMO is that the technology of the internet has done what it does and allowed small groups of people to find others like them and network and band together to gain influence. It's a "community" of sadists."
My brother's analogy for this is as such:
You have a uncanny urge to f*%^ cars. In the past, you have to keep this inside because the morals and strictures of your immediate community would judge this temper the act itself. Now the internet allows you to find the other 268 weirdos in the world who share this particular need to put your d*^* in a tailpipe. Now you're a community!
You can type dick on the internet. We won't tell...
@ The End (and this whole thread): In Other Words, society has gone mad. I blame Covid and the measures taken to control it, esp. the lockdowns (I'm a lefty, a Green, so don't jump to conclusions). The combination of fear and isolation is pretty lethal.
Granted, the setup was the extreme reaction of Democrats (not the Left) to Trump's election - which was their fault. That was intolerable; they simply couldn't face it (happens I was in a room full of Dems that election night, so I know whereof I speak), so they disassociated. Add a pandemic and an incompetent response to that, and they took all of us with them.
It's been mad all along. We're just going through a rapid change in the mechanisms of social control. Lamestream consumerism and individualism is waning while new secular moralism evolves to fill the void. This had to happen (was documented by the more observant commentators before 2015) because of the replacement of top-down broadcast culture with bottom-up ad-hoc networks. Now the ruling class is learning to control those networks and the new secular moralism is happy with that.
It's all very interesting but just a bunch of self-absorbed navel gazing in relation to the effects of empire on the rest of the world (people, other biology etc).
Sorry to respond twice but...
1. Not just sadism, it's a combination of sadism and cowardice. And that works also for joining in with national aggression.
2. It's not a psychopathology if it is normal.
I've been wondering about the network dynamics of pile-ons, shameings, and cancellations for years. Each participant chooses to do so, spends a little of their social capital doing so, takes on a certain risk, in other words: invests. Why? I was thinking about it while walking the dogs this morning and about how Americans get such a morale boost from national aggression, i.e. the presidential approval bump from bombing or otherwise making foreigners suffer. I cannot make sense of these things without believing that people are rewarded by hurting others, i.e. that they really are sadists. Ofc there are other important forces at play but without sadism I don't think you have a convincing theory. Idk why Taibbi and others that talk so much about these stories always steer clear of it.
@Tom Worster
The chilling discovery of so many recent brain studies since the cost of fMRIs have become reasonably inexpensive, is that the *impetus for "piling on", etc. comes from the Primitive Human brain located at the base of the
brain, and rising from the top end of the spinal cord.
Human beings are rewarded with *pleasure for activities that *further their survival chances. Thus, babies have taste buds not only on the tongue, but also on the sides of cheeks, and on the upper palate. As you all know, babies will suckle on a *rock ! Because suckling is the *most important way of contributing to a baby's chance for survival, and you can see their *eyes roll back with the pleasure with which the brain rewards them with for suckling.
Now, very little "advertized", but certainly well known among the scientific circles, adult human beings are *also given a pleasure response for *hitting a perceived enemy - animal or human - furthering their "protection instinct" for their offspring and other aspects of what they perceive to be their *own survival values.
Both men and women have experienced being in a fight, having the knuckles connect with cranial *bone tissue and being surprised to find (as I was the first time I felt it, back in high school, that there *is a shot of pleasure created *by that contact. Survival reward from the Lizard Brain.
I did not pursue that "as a career", because it quickly occurred to me that, *if that is wired into MY brain, it is also (as we have long since *proven) wired into *all humans, to differing degrees, both male and female. It is wired into the Brain Stem, or what we pejoratively call our "Lizard Brain", but it is *there in all of us. The piling on to others (safely, as online) is *still rewarded by the Lizard Brain, and is much *safer than "piling on" physically, unless the numbers greatly favor "your team".
So, abusing animals - check - the Lizard Brain ...... abusing and beating up fellow humans - check - the Lizard Brain. There is *rarely a case of abuse that is sourced in the area of higher functioning of the brain, except in cases of crime or war analysis (both of which are *rewarded by the Lizard Brain, because we are still killing neighbors and stealing their "goods".)
The Lizard Brain is *all instinct and emotion. Its dictates are often *justified and *excused by the higher functioning areas of the brain, but they rarely originate there.
That is the prime engine of mob violence. Everyone leaves the "higher mind at the door, and they work as a group from the level of the mass Lizard Brain.
In terms of geologic time, humankind is only the bat of an eyelash away from our cave-dwelling ancestors. Our *technology has wildly advanced, but when you look at the way we *apply that technology, we find the Lizard Brain there, still happily at work. The cave man used a club to beat their neighbors over the head and then steal their food, families, etc. from them.
(Perhaps the original impetus for slavery ? )
Today we have astounding nuclear weapons with which we do what ?
Beat (or threaten to beat) our neighbors over the head with, so we can steal their food, families, etc. THAT has not changed. The main thing to have changed is only *very impressive "upgrades" to weapons and strategies for beating the neighbor over the head with same.
This is why the cycle cannot be *reasoned away. It must be recognized for what it is, and then a plan for *dealing with that reality created via reason as we go forward. No one has ever successfully *argued the Lizard Brain out of *anything.
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of anything he was never reasoned into.”
Some of the comments in TK News deserve to hoisted to articles. This is one.
My anything-goes Substack blog "thefsb" (click my name here for a link) would gladly publish it. If you're interested, you can email thefsb at substack or comment on something there.
Thanks for the recommendation.
It quite matters here, as The End states, that we differentiate between the followers and "the core group that drives them". The followers are, more or less, naive victims. The core group has a monstrious goal against c.1500-c.2000 Western civ.
I would question this assumption as well. I think the sadists are being manipulated and used by others that have clear goals that do not involve the sadism as an end but as a means to free social and cultural capital that is currently tied up in traditions and institutions. Same as how the Bolsheviks were used to destroy the traditional society and monarchy of Russia. I think its not the sadists that are a new phenomenon but the intentional weaponization of them that is a 20th century invention. I could be wrong though.
OK, yes, agreed. Three groups here, maybe more. The sadists exist, and are part of the group I was (above) calling the drivers. But of course they are being used, too, via "intentional weaponization", and are different from those who want to re-form civilization. The former are merely (a particular form of) selfish, while the latter have an end goal of severe social stratification and control a la feudalism.
I tend to vacillate between two possibilities
1. Global oligarchs find that traditional culture and institutions interfere with maximizing profit. That would include private property for "the serfs" I think. Thats all just capital tied up where they can't get to it.
2. A more esoteric view of the whole of life on earth as a single out of our control process that at this point is using societal bonds, culture and institutions as fuel with the end result being a more liquid, faster moving substrate of "emancipated capital." Kind of like how gasoline doesn't burn until it transitions from liquid to vapor.
None of these people fell from Mars. People who allow sadists to rule them must, in some way, condone, approve of and support sadism.
Good comment, but I don't see how 1 and 2 are necessarily mutually exclusive.
"Same as how the Bolsheviks were used to destroy the traditional society and monarchy of Russia." The trouble with this is that the Bolsheviks really just replaced the "traditional society" - they were very Russian. Lenin was a lot like Peter the Great (a very mixed compliment) and Stalin re-incarnated Ivan the Terrible. You don't escape 1000 years of history all that easily.
It does appear that the country has done some growing up since then; doing better than we are.
Did you study evolutionary biology in college, or what was your focus? Your posts are crisp and informative, thank you. Some of what you write almost seems intuitive as well. That doesn't diminish the points. Your scientific-historical perspective is a perfect read on the current crisis, but one that has severe costs because it implies a choice. Like the escaped slave running into barbarian tribes: do we continue to behave in concert with this postmodern dreck, pretending America still exists as it was, but suffering totalitarian ruin? Or do we fully resort to tribalism, resuscitate as many of the saplings of civilization as possible, walling off, going to war, killing other Americans in a total destruction of this nation but a preservation of a future civilization? That's the Mad Max/Idiocracy future, indeed. It didn't have to be this way, but one of our biggest weaknesses in the past thirty-fifty years has been to allow stupid people to say stupid things and not be corrected for fear of judgment, that includes the youth and their naturally sociopathic distrust of mature systems of organization. I think it's going to be a slow crawl to destruction and reformation. The totalitarianism that has developed will continue until all past norms are entirely trampled and there's a generational break - then it'll be Mad Max mayhem, with few wizened fellows to reeducate the warriors. I write fiction and studied literature, however, so this is also an indulgence of my particular brand of intelligence.
Not sure why it's "_even_ the religious among us have lost"... etc. (emphasis added)
The "religious"--whether formally or informally, strictly or loosely read--are something like world-leaders in the loss of an ability to think intelligently--about victims or many other things. There are exceptions to this, of course. But those are to the credit of the individual's innate characteristics, not the supposed virtues of his or her chosen faith--which so many others, no "exceptions" themselves, whose religion apparently leaves much as it "found them."
But you make, perhaps, a good point: "not (or less) Torquemada, but (than) Calvin"; for me, that's tempered by my now-more-abiding notice of a certain marked sadism in so much of contemporary life. Sadistic impulses--the potential for them--are in every one of us. This is, like so much about the world that remains too taboo for open mention or acknowledgement, simply entirely unwelcome.
I note, without surprise, that nowhere in the commentary does either the term or the concept of sadism even appear in the analysis of "Lolita" or its depraved main character. I don't pretend to know what Nabokov was up to in writing "Lolita"--beyond the general interests and motives of most novelists. Nor would I particularly recommend the character of Humbert Humbert as an object lesson for those interested in better seeing the sadistic tendencies--which are not new--in human nature.
What we'd be better served by grasping is not the ghoulishly obvious cases of sadism but the way it works in so many who'd typically never be suspected of it. Again, this is a _human_ characteristic the potential for which is always present in _all_ of us. The difference between those who keep a lid on it and those who don't relate to many and varied circumstantial and accidental features of life.
That doesn't strike me as being a prominent insight gained by reading Nabokov's "Lolita".
Shakespeare had more insights into human nature in general and its darker--including its sadistic--aspects. And that's before the Marquis ever put pen to paper.
But this being Matt's forum, they're his literary tastes to exhibit here.
I am a religious person who thinks deeply about it. But not a Calvinist -- one of those people who does not accept penal substitution theories along with about the first 1000 yrs of Christianity. But I agree with you. I keep seeing H Clinton in a little Mao suit raising the flag of the cultural revolution -- everything is evil but us!
Confronting the woke on hypocrisy today is like when televangelist preachers were getting caught up in sex scandals back in the 80s. People will tolerate a sincere asshole fanatic, but hypocrites will never survive.
wait, what?
the odds always favor the hypocrites.
i would have said that it's more a banality-of-evil type of subject. cruelty and the bid for/abuse of power are not peculiar to one gender/ethnicity/class or even cultural sub-group. it's in the bones, perhaps the most human characteristic of all. or as human a characteristic as any other maybe.
something about social dynamics and maybe a bit about Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" something something....
I think the evil here is profound in its scope if not literary dramatics. I think the damage and trauma done to humanity by the two world wars led to a profound reorganization of what society considers acceptable and in order to defeat the darkness they looked a bit too deeply and the darkness got inside of them.
«The Woke are villains. They identify with the evil, the destruction of innocence and the exertion of power.»
Ah the simplistic “Good People and Bad People” mindset in the title of this post. Consider the equivalent formulation from the other side:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/05/speak-truth-to-power.html
«In the discussion today, the guests were being asked to speculate on the reasons for certain of Trump’s recent statements and actions: the congratulatory call to Erdogan, the invitation to Duterte, the rather unanticipated statement that he would be “honored” to meet with Kim Jong-un. Why would Trump speak in this way about rulers who murdered their own countrymen, even their own relatives, rigged elections, oppressed opponents, threw reporters in jail?
One after another, guests speculated that Trump was trying to upend long-standing American foreign policy, or was speaking thoughtlessly, or had some hidden negotiating strategy in mind. To each of these guests, Johnson responded courteously, respectfully, clearly signaling that these were just the sorts of sober, serious, thoughtful comments he wished to encourage. Then it happened. One of the guests, I do not know whom it was, said quietly, “I think it is envy.” Johnson erupted almost before the words had been uttered. In a loud, flustered voice, he burst out, “But you cannot mean that you think he would like to do those things! But, but, but, surely you do not mean that.” Johnson went on in this way, speaking over his guest, who was trying, so far as I could hear, to say “Yes, I think that is just what he wants to do.”
It was so manifestly, obviously, undeniably true»
The argument is quite logical: evil people think evil thoughts, speak evil words, perform evil deeds, so it is illogical to think that when they say something it is not for evil reasons. :-)
No offense but I don't discuss anything with anyone who starts a comment off with "Ah, the..." Its just a clear sign of excessive pedantry, arrogance, and a general lack of knowing anything about anything.
"....and a general lack of knowing anything about anything...." Speaking of excessive pedantry, arrogance, and (especially) a general lack of knowing anything about anything. And, of course---no offense.
“while someone who traffics in genuinely evil choices on a daily basis, dumping deadly toxins or doing PR for dictators or governing the State of New York by tribute, can still win Man of the Year or a key to a city with a donation or two.”
Don’t forget the fucking Emmy Award!
Great point! I live in NY and thought wow, why is he writing a book? It's still going on and you don't know what is happening yet. This book was published last year and he was given 5 million. Who in publishing is that stupid not to see how bad that was. That is a story someone should look into. Who said yea let's give him 5 mil to write the story.? Someone that wanted to help him get re-elected?
May not even be that sinister. Could be that someone in publishing saw all of the daily viewers and thought there was potentially a shitload of money to be made from a book.
I do not believe he wrote the book. Someone else wrote it and he got paid off.
That says it all, doesn’t it?
The internet allows us to be stupid and judgmental without even really trying. We get handed a bunch of "black and white" choices and are ready to take sides without a better look at what the noise is about.
Have a nice vacation.
It's sort of like voting.
Very much!
Given two-party duopoly, that polarizing frame is implicit in voting.
Worse, it encourages the pop media narrative that the entirety of someone's personality can be glimpsed by learning their vote in the most recent Presidential election- or, as a more pseudo-sophisticated pose, by reviewing their pattern of voting over the years. As if that single (set of) decision(s) amounted to an X-ray of someone's soul. Even when the decisions were made by someone (like myself) who typically feels essentially cornered into voting for the less unattractive choice, in elections for Congress of the Presidency. Yet this simplistic frame that an individual's vote says all anyone needs to known about them is ubiquitous in American popular media, and discourse. And one need look no further than the accusations, stereotypes, valorization and derision that fly in Internet comments, triggered by nothing more than a single bit of knowledge (or assumption) about someone's admission of vote or party affiliation.
This really is the state of the discourse in American society, encouraged in "newspapers of record" like the Washington Post and NY Times, and the range of TV networks who still control the preponderance of the agenda of media attention, from Newsmax to MSNBC. I think the power of the Internet- including Youtube- is still pretty marginal in comparison to the TV networks; I'm not despairing over that reality, but I think it's naive to imagine that the Internet has somehow supplanted "old media" in most respects. Above all, it's crucial to realize that "the Internet" is not a single entity- like, say, CNN. Although the medium is often contextualized in that misleading way- particularly by those who view it as unwanted competition from an uncontrolled frontier, and seek to put it in its place.
That said, if you really want to make an end run around television, the Internet is not sufficient; you have to read. A lot. Continuously. Including the primary sources and most articulate exponents of the views with which you find the most disagreement. Because if you have no familiarity with opposing arguments, you don't fully comprehend your own. But this gets back to the lack of critical thinking exercise in most American schools (and everywhere else, but formal schooling is supposed to be the place where people get equipped with these skills, and most Americans lack them...only singling out Americans because as "my people", they're the ones I know best; I'm not that cosmopolitan. Although it is my impression that the British educational system places much more emphasis on debating skill as a faculty that isn't reserved for law students.)
The whole dismal business of insisting on sticking angel wings on one polarized (political party or ideological) side, and devil horns on the other- it's so tired, so robotic, so dull-witted, that it's tedious to read. There was so much of it in the Paul Jay discussion that reading comments got to be like wading through concrete. Reading down from the top of this discussion has at least proved to have some entertainment value for me. (I admit, when I read, it's all about the relationship of my own perspective to the material on the page. After all, who else is doing the reading? I couldn't read on behalf of someone else if I tried.)
One more story to make all of you Republicans even more paranoid.
The facility I work at is primarily female. Consequently the men, or at least the men who have been there for a while, all know each other. We're all pretty friendly. When meet up we compare notes on our observed lunacy. And there is oodles. How can I put this delicately? Women can be nuts. Completely certifiable.
If you feel it's necessary you can now hate me. It's a-ok. I sympathize. I hate me sometimes too.
One guy, who I've known for about 15 years, made the move into management. Only a few penises have made the leap. All have regretted it. But it's more money so there's that.
So my buddy & I were at the facility's smoke shack.(It's really a gazebo). They segregated smokers there because they could. I quit smoking years ago but we were chatting so I tagged along.
A young black girl was having an anti-Trump seizure. A long anti-Trump seizure. So, all the guy did after she finished was say, "Okay, you don't like Trump. Can you tell me his crime?"
She began shrieking hysterically about racists & such as she backed away from him & left. About 5 minutes later another young black woman showed up and started photographing him with her phone from a nice safe distance like he was a Yeti sighting.
Within an hour he was called into his boss' office, reprimanded & told that he was forbidden to talk politics at work or he could face termination. Nothing happened to the girl.
Now, if anyone can explain this as being even remotely fair, I'd love to read your thoughts.
You and others who have to endure this kind of harassment should consider filing a lawsuit on the basis of sex discrimination. It's past time for shit to get real.
Well, I'm basically on a sinking ship anyway. Their staff shortages are chronic. It's so bad they've raised the shift differential for working weekends to $5/hr. & doubled the weekend wage. I'm currently making over $40/hr. to mostly watch TV. I make sure the clients are well cared for and have access to the shit they like to do, otherwise I'm pretty bored.
I mean I'm not stupid. I'll take the money guilt free. But $40/hr. doesn't seem sustainable. Even at that rate few apply.
I've worked with violent clients for most of my time there. When a client is in a behavior the facility has a code phrase staff is supposed to announce over the intercom. When someone uses it all male staff are supposed to run to the area where the behavior is happening to assist. Let me repeat that first part: ALL MALE STAFF. The women are exempt.
The reality is that, at any given time, there just aren't that many men working there. I've made pages & had no one show. Yet there was a veritable army of women milling about.
I suppose the trade off is that I'm not allowed to work with female clients. Because, y'know, all men are potential rapists. I guess I don't argue because I'd rather work with men. Women have extra bodily fluids so more there's more to clean when things go awry.
Aw, man. Listen to audio books. $40/hr is great; take it as long as you can get it.
Take heart though, EVERYBODY is hiring right now.
So... if you start poking around a little a decidedly better class of worry might be waiting for you there.
I mean, sure, if he wants to lose his job.
That's not a foregone conclusion, and choices have to be made. It sounds like Spiderbaby decided the trade-offs were worth it. Other people are making other choices. For instance, Amy Cooper is suing her employer for wrongful termination. The FAIR Foundation is also tracking and assisting other lawsuits.
They're pitting slave against slave.
Best thing you can do is not get involved in any of it.
People are downright psychotic these days. There's a guy I have to work with who if politics or COVID, (read as: politics,) are brought up and anyone even questions one of his MSNBC plots, he becomes instantly unhinged and starts name-calling, ranting and just melts down.
I am gathering that this has been a regular thing for his 24 years there.
So... when I get snapped at for asking even a work related question, I simply turn on my heel and walk straight away.
I go find something else to keep busy with.
It's better than giving up my sweetheart job over something as dumb as "some cunt looking for someone to flip out on". I'm sucka free.
For life!
Now, if you hate the job... there's definitely potential for entertainment there triggering the programmed NPCs into insanity.
It was obvious they have won as soon as you used the word “oodles”!
Men and women (for the most part) shouldn't work together. Its pretty fucking clear this is a failed experiment.
I'm a woman, and some of the coworkers I've gotten along with and respected most were men. I've also worked with a few men who I'm pretty sure were clinically insane and should never be allowed to interact with society in general. So I think it's more that sane people and lunatics shouldn't work together. Crazy comes in both genders.
I'm female, but what if i'm the lunatic? I'm not convinced that i'm not.
I agree over all. I'm just not convinced that, in general or in all circumstances, its a great idea.
I'm a woman, and I don't like where that could lead. It depends on the individuals. I'm in an industry that's 95% male, and I get along just fine. I have a hide like a rhino, and a focus on deliverables.
Nietzsche, one of the philosophers who influenced Nabokov, argues in On the Genealogy of Morals that it is the category of "evil" itself which blinds one to any nuance or ambivalence in moral thinking. It's not just the woke who divide the world into categories of good and evil however; your average right-wing grifter barks constantly about the evil left, postmodernist marxists, George Soros, etc. and they make a nice living doing so. Nietzsche described this whole way of thinking as "slave morality" because he saw it as a way of manipulating people so damaged by life, so traumatised, that the way to influence them and gain their loyalty was to channel their resentment using simplistic moral categories. Nietzsche thought this social psychology explained the success of Judeo-Christian morality; today it might explain the business model of "Hate Inc".
I'm no expert on Nietzsche, but I think he would actually consider WOKEISM to be a form of slave morality, for the way it glorifies weakness. This was one of his big criticisms of Christianity, after all, this bizarre morality that treats weakness as a virtue.
But I suspect Nietzsche would view current society more as The Last Men. They've lost all ambition, are fearful, and only want safety and petty happiness. Which sounds way too familiar to me.
I agree with that hunch. I suspect he'd reject, outwardly at least, the victimist stance of _these_ people (the "Woke"), wallowing in their self-justifying "victim-hood" even while he was himself no (honest) stranger to such stuff. Whatever his insights, Nietzsche lacked nothing in a barely disguised sense of victim-hood. His writings are the stuff of a man who burned under the resentment of the world which never granted him the recognition he felt he deserved--and probably because no world _could_ have ever granted sufficient recognition to such a professional victim. In that, if in nothing else, he and the BLM mob are joined in un-righteous indignation that seems to have few peers.
It may be worth observing that, in _The Genealogy of Morals_, he theorized that Christianity was a way of reversing the values of the ancient world, which generally emphasized strength, mastery, and victory. Similarly what I think you're calling Wokeism, the seeming fetishization of victimhood, would seem to be a way for a defeated people to reverse the outcomes of various political and cultural (i.e. religious) battles by changing the ways in which the outcomes are evaluated.
I confess, though, that I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. The word _woke_, already dialectical, seems to be uncertainly ascriptive as well. It is hard to know exactly what it refers to. Going into the streets because one sees a man strangled by the police on television seems like a fairly natural reaction not requiring much ideology.
Christ turned the tables on the ancient world when He said that those who would be greatest of all must be servants of all. And what really was unique about Christianity was its praise of humility -- not victimhood. ("A religion of women and slaves!") What's going on now is very close to the religious hypocrisy Christ condemned in the religious establishment of his time, something entirely different
Oh, I think our ruling class (here in the US, at least) are very far from hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue; these people have no use for virtue whatever. They do evil and revel in it. They're proud of spending 750 billion dollars on unnecessary weaponry and warfare just to be doing it, to say nothing of the ways in which they do business and finance it.
So what's a loser (including women and slaves) to do? No one stops desiring power, for we are willful animals and want to do what we want to do. To solve the problem, it's necessary to alter one's values and behavior so as to undercut the existing system of values. I think Nietzsche portrays this as a negative, as a form of destruction, but I see it as a radically brilliant response to defeat.
Nietzsche did write: “The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect [Geist] of the powerless injected into it..." So he didn't view the "slave revolt in morality" as a purely regressive development. Without it we would be a bit like the animals, socially ossified into natural hierarchies, without mass societies or a history of progress, innovation, and so on. Right-wing interpretations of Nietzsche completely fail to appreciate this. I think Nietzsche's point was that in modernity, everyone is a "slave" in the sense that they are subject to the hyper-sociality of modern society, a "social straitjacket" in which everyone is constantly judging everyone else. Psychological damage and "ressentiment" is an inevitable outcome. This makes us open to manipulation by ascetic "priests" who hate life in all its ambivalence but also, as you point out, it can be used to spur positive social change. If you're interested, Jeffrey Jackson's book 'Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories' is very good on this.
Great comment. It's like we are programmed to think in a binary. It's so demonstrably effective today as then. It takes a tremendous amount of intellectual discipline and time to think things through properly and fully, making a conclusion as simplistic as a moral judgement almost impossible.
In the western world, the US, Europe, Canada, et al, we are at a fork in morality. On one tine are the progressives, and on the other are conservatives. And you can call them whatever you like, but the basic fact that they do not share a common version of good and bad is all you really need to realize. And until there is a political and cultural reckoning, episodes like the Cuomo affair or the response to COVID, War, and pretty much everything else becomes a focal point in the struggle for cultural dominance, much like two dogs attempting to settle who is in charge.
Cuomo is expendable, but only for the transgressions of #metoo, as he will be replaced by a reliable Democrat. Northam in VA was actually threatened by a Republican taking his place, and that can not stand. See, the Dems thought that with the assertion of Obama that they had won the culture war, but the pushback during his term was a clear sign that they hadn't. Indeed, Trump's election over HRC was further proof that they were not in the position they thought they were, so they have done a full-court press and looped in all the far left that they can, as they cannot afford any loss of numbers.
Nabakov, much like Ellroy whom I have been rereading this month, isn't canceled because this generation cannot read complicated novels.
Ellroy is worth a re-read.
That's a lot of re-reading. He's fairly prolific. One novel about every 3 years on average.
...I still haven't tackled Proust...
One of my courses was Readers' Advisory. Librarians used to do this (not much now). I never slogged through Proust, either, but have liked Anthony Powell's 12 volume Dance to the Music of Time...which has a character based on Crowley.
"Nabakov, much like Ellroy whom I have been rereading this month, isn't canceled because this generation cannot read complicated novels."
So when the left cancels people, it's because the left is evil. But when the left doesn't cancel people, it's because the left is stupid. Got it.
You had me at: "In the western world, the US, Europe, Canada, et al, we are at a fork in morality. On one tine are the progressives, and on the other are conservatives. And you can call them whatever you like, but the basic fact that they do not share a common version of good and bad is all you really need to realize. And until there is a political and cultural reckoning, episodes like the Cuomo affair or the response to COVID, War, and pretty much everything else becomes a focal point in the struggle for cultural dominance, much like two dogs attempting to settle who is in charge."
An excellent assessment and concisely stated.
Ellroy is great.
other novels that go on (so far) unscathed (not that there's a lot of deep and complicated stuff going on here:
by Brett Easton Ellis:
"Less Than Zero" (1985), "American Psycho" (1991)
by Chuck Palahniuk :
"Fight Club"(1996)
by Dominick Dunne,
Fatal Charms : And Other Tales of Today (2012) (read)
unflattering journalism/memoir on Hollywood and film-star celebrity life. For gore and immorality, fiction is challenged to equal reality depicted here. Dunne, as correspondent for the magazine, "Vanity Fair", also covered the murder trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of murdering their parents. Try that for twisted morals and gore.
____________
the listing is not to be read as an indication that _I've_ read these novels.
I thought BEE had been thoroughly cancelled.
There is no such thing as 'cancelled.' That just means that some people don't read them. Plus ca change. American Psycho is a fascinating, and deeply troubling, experimental work.
Understood. It’s more a comment about BEE (not his books) now being a persona non grata, just as JK is. I’m not aware of anyone attacking the Harry Potter books either, only JK personally. She has FU money so it doesn’t matter to her.
Rowling gave a million quid to the No side during the Scottish independence referendum, helping keep us as an English colony, so I am not the biggest fan. But the shit she has taken about the whole tired trans subject is absolutely unbelievable.
I thought American Psycho sucked. Yeah, i can in a way appreciate it intellectually and on premise. But the writing is just god awful.
I loved Martin Amis' London Fields and Money. But it seems that they weren't quite as loved by the British due to portrayals of the working classes. I have to admit that they got a point that i had missed.
If you like Chuck Palahniuk, here's a recent (reprinted) blog post of mine on ripping the piss out of the hack. :)
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-high-priest-of-harmful-matter.html
I just came across this, and it seems to fit a bit; good or bad?:
“I watched them tearing a building down,
A gang of men in a busy town.
With a ho-heave-ho and a lusty yell,
They swung a beam, and the side wall fell.
I asked the foreman: "Are these skilled--
And the men you'd hire if you had to build?"
He gave me a laugh and said: "No, indeed!
Just common labor is all I need.
I can wreck in a day or two
What builders have taken a year to do."
And I thought to myself as I went my way,
Which of these roles have I tried to play?
Am I a builder who works with care
Measuring life by a rule and square?
Am I shaping my deeds to a well made Plan,
Patiently doing the best I can?
Or am I a wrecker, who walks the town
Content with the labor of tearing down?”
Edgar A. Guest
Don't forget the capitalist need for 'creative destruction', so poetically and accurately described in _The Communist Manifesto_ -- ''All that is solid melts into air....'' and all that, and its later version: ''Move fast a break stuff.''
It's like I say: the Capitalist Dogma of Perpetual Growth and material accumulation is all fun and games, until you eat your way through your resource base and end up drowning in your own shit. It's a reduction of human consciousness to the level of yeast.
In that regard, General Purpose Money can be seen to fulfill the role played by ethyl alcohol in the process of the extinction of the yeast colony.
It's sort of interesting that the human brain seems to fail to perceive so many obvious things, like if you eat all your food you'll go hungry etc. Of course many do, but so many don't.
The timing of this amuses me. I watched "Baseball Twitter" explode with outrage over a clip of a Colorado Rockies game, in which a person in the crowd appeared to be yelling The N-word over and over while a black player was at-bat.
Former players, TV analysts, baseball writers, and other assorted Twitter blue-checks quickly piled on. "Find this vile man and ban him from games forever!" "No, arrest him!" "It's 2021 and no one around this man even reacted as he yelled that."
Then another video of the incident appeared. The shouter in the stands can be seen, he was looking off to his right, about 20 seats down, where the Rockies' mascot, named Dinger, was. He was trying to get Dinger's attention. "Dinger! Dinger!"
Not a one of the outrage mob apologized for being a part of this societal rot. Ah, well. Until the next pitchfork-and-torch session!
Omg, I laughed so hard at this story. I had to take a screenshot of it. It's Blazing Saddles worthy.
@Fred O. Fisher
PRIMO Post ! Thank you *so much for the laugh !
Oh my I didn't realize the ending of that story........
And they’re the same people who mockingly laugh at #MyButtWasWiped.
A lot to think about. Could Nabokov have shame his ancestor led the inquiry into the Petrashevsky the Circle that sent Dostoevsky to Siberia? Could there be generational rivalry? Could N. (a more proud lineage) have some sense of entitlement like AC?
Connolly, Julian W. “Nabokov’s Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and The Gentle Creature.” Nabokov Studies 4, no. 1 (1997): 15–36.
Overlooking the evil and spotting morality seem to be frequent traits of modern media and modern opinion. Cuomo has enjoyed a public pass for decades of, as Matt called it, “dickishness”. Now all of a sudden he is newly discovered as evil. Amazingly, the man sentenced thousands of elderly people to death by putting covid patients into nursing facilities. His ego and his politics were so huge that he could not be bested by Trump who had outfitted to USS Enterprise to accomodate and treat all of them. Sentencing people to death to save his ego seems a lot more evil than his “dickishness”. How could media have such messed up morality to not notice the difference?
They notice alright, then they gobble Adderall and start writing thousands of stories about what a GOOD FUCKING JOB he's doing and give him awards and continue not reporting on everything he does wrong.
If they're told by D leadership or worse, the CIA it gets a pass then it gets a pass.
Matt: As a subscriber and long-time fan, I ask you to consider the only comment that kept me listening to what seemed very close to a crackpot video. The commentator said, "If the Covid pandemic were real and dangerous, how come we have not seen the corpses of the homeless in L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere stacked like cord wood along the avenues of their camps." Every person to whom I have posed this question has wrinkled up perplexed. Whilst on a beach, give it some thought.
Careful there Johnny, you are thinking too much which is illegal.
And this is exactly what happened in New York - the homeless who died of COVID were buried in mass graves on Hart Island. So this thing that according to you isn't happening, is actually both happening and receiving a lot of press coverage.
https://time.com/5913151/hart-island-covid/
It is happening, but we are efficient. However, it may be that the plague is only gathering its forces. A defensive façade consisting of happy talk is not going to be very effective if it really gets going.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That even after 17 months of covid, you still don't know what the mortality rate is? It's around 1%-2%, some people say as low as 0.1%. So is it really such a huge surprise to you that 99% of a lot of homeless people is still a lot of homeless people?
When i see situations like Cuomo, i'm always taken back to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. At the end, where Bill Haydon was uncovered as the mole. And Smiley and the others realize that, or course it was Bill Haydon, everyone always knew it and no one wanted to admit that of acknowledge it, even to themselves.
How could anyone not have known that Andrew Cuomo was always a total piece of shit. Either they were too flat out dumb, or knew it all the time but played the three monkeys because he was on their team.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? How the Dems had a wankfest over him because he was going to go after Trump? And told the women who he assaulted him not to report him because he was too valuable? Same energy. Ditto the Clintons, etc, rinse and repeat.
And for any whatabouters out there, ditto for Trump and many Repubs. Same energy. I guess we're all fucked.
Trump isn’t a hypocrite-he’s like a Louisiana politician-they are upfront about blatant skirt chasing or corruption.
I wasn't clear. I wasn't calling Trump the hypocrite here, just a lot of his supporters. Definitely including politicians. And Trump not the only Republican that gets a pass on many issues from the party. Look at Rick Scott, for example.
How so with Scott? I’m not really aware of that.
Not sexual stuff.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-op-col-rick-scott-medicare-fraud-20181002-story.html
I was surprised he never floated a "lie tax" for the media like Huey Long did.
@Mostly disagreeable
He was never *nearly as "creative" as Huey Long ! :-O ;-D
"People tend to believe evil is something external to them – yet it is a projection of the shadow onto others. As one who projects the principle for absolute and unresolvable evil onto others – it is to the degree that one condemns others and finds evil in others, that one is unconscious of the same thing within oneself, or the potential of that within oneself. It is a projection of one’s own shadow."
-Carl Jung
With all due respect to Jung, good exists - evil is non-existence. Truth is beauty, beauty truth .. . 'that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know'.
For example, not long ago a woman driving a car whilst primping on the cell-phone crashed into me. This was evil. Banal evil - she didn't intentionally crash into me - but still evil.
Nevertheless, out of the goodness of my heart (& after her insurance paid off.) I forgave her .. . and the evil [she did] was washed away like tears in the rain, like it never happened, non-existent.
Or take the coiled-up rattlesnake. There is nothing evil about the rattlesnake's warning - it's a fair warning. Nevertheless, if I put the snake in my pocket and he bit me .. . that would be evil.
*this matter has been fully elucidated.
It's amazing what this moral condemnation has in common with mental illness. The hyper black and white thinking seems to be the Splitting of Borderline Personality disorder. Virtue Signaling is narcissism. If people of color don't get the vaccine first is privileging white people at the expense of a more vulnerable population. If black people get the vaccine first it's experimenting on them. Is this the Double Bind of narcissistic abuse? Adherents tend not to be the most rational people around with academic support coming from the least academically rigorous areas of the academy. This behavior is championed by charlatans and supported by well meaning people who don't know any better.
Racism and such are problems, but leaders in various movements like Robin Diangelo favor some equivalent of The Four Humours Theory to address them while padding their wallets and stroking their egos.
@Red
Great Analysis Red, Thanks !