A must read on the covid madness…from Lockdown Sceptics.
To get a better idea of the mind set behind the state-provided insanity, it’s all happened many times before. Read: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay, published in 1841!
Truly, there’s nothing new under the Sun.
Rebel Yell
If you have women in your life, you will know this to be true. Women watch a lot of crime dramas. They absorb crime blogs, podcasts and television. My theory is that this is a form of education for them. As the weaker and more vulnerable sex – yes I said that and mean it – they have an interest in educating themselves about the world they live in, one where the other sex is, on the whole significantly stronger, faster and more violent than they are. Crime drama acts as an education in the world without the danger of actual contact with it. Kind of like men watching Andrew Camarata fixing machines that we will never own. I always wanted to know how they get a tread off a tank. Women always want to know exactly how dangerous the world is without being murdered.
Many years ago (in 2003) a man drove his truck up the steps of the main entrance of the Canadian Parliament buildings. CBC just happened to be there. He was wrestled to the ground as he shouted: “you are all a bunch of Satan worshippers!” . I heard him say this on CBC news, and I thought to myself, how did that slip through the censorship? How had he guessed? Who had told him?
So when I heard that the basic premise of the evolving doctrines of the QAnon conspiracy was that an elite of pederastic or hebephile Satan worshippers is running the United States, I thought – nothing new here. That it was being run out of some pizza joint somewhere just adds that piquant touch of pseudo-facticity that lends credence to nonsense on stilts. Do they not know it is being run out the Council on Foreign Relations?
There has always been wickedness in high places, to cite St Paul. Always will be.
Thus I was interested to read on Unherd that “Facebook is radicalising your parents“. As the avergae age of users of Facebook rises, the kinds of concerns expressed naturally reflect the concerns of middle-aged and older people. (This usage pattern reflects the gradual ageing of the population, as births have crashed since the 1970s)
I quote: “The most shared news pieces on the site are increasingly on the Right. On 20 July of this year, for instance, the top-performing Facebook link posts by US pages were:
1. Fox News
2. Fox News
3. Occupy Democrats
4. Fox News
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Ben Shapiro
7. Ben Shapiro
8. An0maly
9. Blue Lives Matter
10. Dan Bongino”.
In possible accordance with this concern for radicalization of the elderly and the stated concern for spread of the dangerous ideology of QAnon, FaceBook announced the following:
“On October 6, we announced that we will begin removing any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content, in line with our expanded Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy.”
Naturally I was interested in what the policy said. Under the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy’, Facebook has announced the following on its webpages:
In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Facebook. This includes organizations or individuals involved in the following:
We also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in these activities. Learn more about our work to fight terrorism online here.
Terrorist organizations and terrorists, which include:
Any non-state actor that:
Hate organizations and their leaders and prominent members
A hate organization is defined as:
Mass and multiple murderers (including attempts)
Human trafficking groups and their leaders
Human trafficking groups are organizations responsible for any of the following:
Criminal organizations and their leaders and prominent members
A criminal organization is defined as:
Any association of three or more people that is united under a name, color(s), hand gesture(s) or recognized indicia, that has engaged in or threatens to engage in criminal activity, including (but not limited to)
We do not allow symbols that represent any of the above organizations or individuals to be shared on our platform without context that condemns or neutrally discusses the content.
We do not allow content that praises any of the above organizations or individuals or any acts committed by them.
We do not allow coordination of support for any of the above organizations or individuals or any acts committed by them.
We do not allow content that praises, supports, or represents events that Facebook designates as terrorist attacks, hate events, mass murders or attempted mass murders, serial murders, hate crimes and violating events.
End quote
__________________________
There you have it. Without appeal or means of address to the decision makers, your collection of 3 friends may be designated supporters of ‘hate events’, without any actual event having taken place.
It is really much more pernicious than it appears.
Suppose for instance I became convinced that cousin marriages should not be allowed. (The case is made in Joseph Henrich’s “The WEIRDest people in the world” that the abolition of cousin marriage has marked the character of the people of western Europe profoundly, and in a positive direction for the emergence of modernity). Then I pointed out that in many societies of the world, mainly though not exclusively Muslim, cousin marriages are encouraged. If I pointed out that the suppression of cousin marriages was a necessary condition for the emergence of broadly based non-kinship societies, as Henrich’s book does, and that the secret of success of Western European societies was the suppression of cousin marriages, would I be banned from FaceBook as a hate group, if three of us decided it was an important idea to agree upon and promote?
Now a lawyer might quibble, but you know the answer. You betcha. Some social justice warrior kid would ban you in a flash if he or she thought that a discussion of the negative effects of cousin marriages was aimed at Muslims. Or even if it was not aimed at Muslims but Muslims complained.
We are inventing the new Office of the Inquisition. It is being done before our eyes. It is being done for all the right reasons, as long as you believe harm results from speech.
The least that could be done was what they did about the Inquisition in Portugal in the 1750s. No penalty imposed by the Inquisition was effective unless ratified by the state. That sharply reduced its power. If we cannot avoid the creation of these new Offices of the Inquisition, we should limit their jurisdiction and effectiveness.
A calm inquiry into the nature of beliefs about time, space, law and God is conducted in the 1700s. Are we there again?
Evelyn Waugh remains one of my favorite novelists, not only for his style, but for his acid wit and powers of observation about eternal human hypocrisy.
Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, recounts the story of an upper-crust British Catholic family and the tribulations of their children, Bridey, Julia, Sebastian, and Cordelia in the 1920s and 1930s. The book was made into an outstanding series for British TV in the 1980s, and probably is the very best rendition of any novel in TV form.
Waugh became a Roman Catholic in 1930 and thereafter enjoyed the usual sneers and asides from the establishment literary set who were soaked in liberalism, communism, and materialism—not much different from today. He was not exactly the model of what one might expect.
The American Spectator ran a delightful little article about Waugh recently on the anniversary of his conversion to Catholicism.
As the writer notes:
He was a short-tempered, rude, cranky, insulting, bibulous, intentionally unkind and insensitive man who didn’t much like his children and who, increasingly deaf in his later years, frequently carried with him an ear trumpet, nearly two feet long and comically old-fashioned, that he would raise to his ear when he was speaking and lower when he was spoken to.
How can you not love a guy like that?
He concludes with this little gem:
Indeed, his conversion didn’t seem to seriously alter what one critic termed his “famously rebarbative personality.” The story is told of a courageous woman who once approached the great writer and said, “Mr. Waugh, how can you behave as you do, and still call yourself a Christian?”
“Madam,” Waugh replied. “Were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.”
Rebel Yell
The American Council on Science and Health is an organization devoted to expanding scientific literacy and debunking junk science. These days, that’s a Herculean task. Dr Alex Berezow explains in a recent article how the postmodernist pollution of academia and its infiltration into the media is doing significant damage to America’s world-wide reputation as a leader in science and technology.
When hard work, rational analysis, and careful experimentation are looked upon as “whiteness”, with the implication that they are necessarily bad, you know that the end of an open society is at hand. (Actually, in a weird way, that’s right, as White civilizations in Europe essentially created the modern world and the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment.)
When I was a young lad, the Scientific American (now the Pseudo-Scientific American) was the go-to magazine to get the latest on the most recent advances in science, in articles well-written by some of the world’s leading lights. Now, the Scientific American publishes articles endorsing Biden for President. This is not surprising as the Scientific American has been garbage for a long time.
As Dr Berezow says:
Though nobody can actually define postmodernism, it is characterized by a rejection of objective truth. This toxic ideology is rampant in academia and gaining popularity in the broader culture. Its most nefarious manifestation is Critical Theory, which derives from Marxism and posits that society is nothing but a hierarchy of oppressors and the oppressed. Out of this nonsense comes the absurd belief that the scientific method and even knowledge itself are tools of the white patriarchy….
…This will all backfire. One of the quickest ways to destroy one’s credibility is by being overtly political, yet more of the scientific community is doing precisely that. Once credibility is lost, trust and funding often go along with it.
Let’s see some of these postmodernist crackpots build a bridge…that doesn’t fall down.
Rebel Yell
These days, even the mention of the virtues of imperialism and empire are scorned and condemned by the political class that squats over us. Here, in an article on Unherd is a very interesting new take on empire in general throughout history….
Rebel Yell
The theme I have been exploring on this blog is that a lot of people are more scared of the woke than they are of Trump, whereas all we hear in most media is from people of the opposite belief. The people more scared of Trump than the woke fill the pages of the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and the MSM in general.
A citation:
“If you’ve never heard Joe Rogan’s podcasts, I urge you to listen to them. Rogan has right-wing guests on, but only because he finds them interesting. He endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, favors drug legalization, supports LGBT rights, and so on. He’s a left-libertarian, as far as I can tell. What makes Rogan so much fun to listen to is — again — you feel that you are listening in to a conversation by someone who is genuinely curious about the world, and who is not afraid to talk about things that the prissy, censorious left-wing media are.”
“I am sure Joe Rogan differs from Orthodox Christian socially conservative me in a number of ways, but I would a thousand million times rather live in Joe Rogan World than NPR/NYT World. The stories Joe Rogan lives by are not the stories I live by, mostly, but I would trust Joe Rogan to defend people like me against the Pink Police State that the left seems bound and determined to create. One thing he said in that Douglas Murray podcast that resonated deeply with me: him and Murray agreeing on how insane Trump is, but how people on the left simply cannot grasp that they alarm many center-right people so much that they are less worried about crazy Trump than they are about the crazy left. This seems to be the neuralgic point between my self-described anti-woke liberal reader, and me: that we look at the same things, and dislike the same things, but that he is much more alarmed by Trump than by the woke, while I come down on the opposite side.”
To illustrate my point, this morning’s snippet of wokeness is from that poseur idiot Ibram X. Kendi, with reference to the Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett’s adoption of two Haitian kids:
“Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. twitter.com/jennybethm/sta
Andrew Sullivan’s latest rant against Trump summons the psychological portrait of Shakespeare’s Richard III to malign him. You can learn a great deal about Richard III by reading it, and nothing about Trump. I recommend you read Sullivan precisely because it is so overwrought, so demented, it is a form of entertainment – granted of a dubious variety. An election will not be sufficient to end Trump’s rule, he says.
“This is what we’ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I’m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I’m constantly scolded. He’s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.”
Observe that Sullivan is saying that tyranny need have no objective correlatives or characteristics. It is “pathology” – a sickness. In consequence no evidence is needed, because tyranny is not an arrangement of power.
“This is Trump’s threat. Not the construction of a viable one-party state, but the destruction of practices, norms, civility, laws, customs and procedures that constitute liberal democracy’s non-zero-sum genius. He doesn’t need to be competent to destroy our system of government. He merely needs to be himself: an out-of-control, trust-free, malignant narcissist, with inexhaustible resources of psychic compulsion, in a pluralist system designed for the opposite.”
Sullivan asks us to consider Trump’s greatest policy failures: “the appalling loss of life in the Covid epidemic and the collapse of law and order in the cities.”
As you consider these events, you see a plague unleashed by China (whether by negligence or intention we do not yet know) and principally handled by state medical authorities, and a Democratic Party actively fomenting or encouraging nightly riots while defunding and otherwise demoralizing the police from handling them.
In the case of COVID, Trump has done everything that medical authorities have recommended. He may have intimated his skepticism about some of the advice he has received, but he has taken it and acted upon it. How is Trump responsible for the deaths of people from COVID, any more than he is responsible for deaths from flu or cancer? To ask the question is to answer it. He clamped down on travel from China earlier than the press thought he ought to have done and was crucified for it. All the clampowns, masks and social distancing have done little to nothing to prevent its spread but have harmed the economy and suppressed social and religious activities.
As to the antifa and BLM insurrections in Democratic-controlled cities, Sullivan would have us believe that Trump is responsible for them. If Trump’s responsibility for the deaths from COVID is minimal, his responsibility for the acts of his enemies is nil. Sullivan would say that Trump, by his character and speech, has created the American political Left. His claim is absurd.
“All he wants is chaos, because in chaos, the strong leader wins. Would he incite violence on his behalf if the votes seem to be drifting away from him? You bet he would.”
I cannot link Trump, the bogeyman of the Left, with the stand-up comic, troller, and provocateur that I see. As was pointed out by a ranter a few weeks ago, Americans are going to vote for Trump more because the Democrats and their actions and beliefs piss them off than because they are enamored of the President. This may be a negative impulse, but Democrats need to own up to the extent to which their own behaviours are bringing up the Trump vote.
Which brings too mind this rant, which I found in sieving Facebook last week. It is harsh, very American in tone, and far more true than I would like.
“We consider you to be more despicable, more dangerous, more stupid, and more narcissistic than Donald Trump.”
______________________________________
End of Facebook rant.
This past week I spent a few days with friends at their cottage. They have a complete spectrum of broadcast television available, whereas I have not subscribed to cable for at least five years. During that time, I have cultivated my news and opinion sources by selecting twitter feeds, facebook friends, and youtube videos. I am not living in an outrage bubble. I see more of Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray, for instance, than talking heads. Even my favourite broadcaster, Tucker Carlson, is watched solely through the Intertubes. I have become accustomed to conversations on Triggernometry and other interview shows where questions are asked sincerely and answered comprehensively, where issues are engaged, and answers are open to debate rather than assumed to be false or true according to the Narrative – the tale the media are making up today for our consumption.
It was thus something of a shock to the system to watch reaction to the Speech From the Throne on CTV this week. I simply could not believe the rudeness of the chief Talking Head, Lisa Laflamme. Every question was a gotcha or a “when did you stop beating your wife?”. She made the current Finance Minister look good in that Chrystia Freeland answered hysterical questions with factual responses, and kept her cool throughout.
So naturally as Joe Rogan enters the world of broadcasting, he becomes the target of the hysterics and witch hunters of the MSM. The case in point this morning was a hit piece by Sadaf Ahsan, “Spotify’s dilemma: Censor Joe Rogan or call his podcast free speech?”
She writes:
“But here’s the thing: Rogan has long had a habit of spreading misinformation, sharing his own personal feelings and thoughts as facts, and he’s also a very big fan of conspiracy theories. It’s partly why he’s so popular for a very specific brand of fanboy, which Slate once generously described as “freethinkers who hate the left.”
Oh my goodness, how shocking! An opinion journalist who is sometimes wrong! And add to this the phony dilemma of whether Spotify’s staff has some role in censoring Joe Rogan, or Douglas Murray, or amy of the other thinkers who appear in Youtube. Apart from factual errors he is also accused of “transphobia” – the thought crime of insufficiently accepting that biological males are fmals when they declare themselves to be so.
Joe Rogan now draws viewership that competes seriously with entire cable TV networks.
This is from the article hyperlinked above.
“Joe probably gets 5-7 million views of full podcasts a day, which makes him far larger than any TV host.
Joe gets 200 million podcast views a month. CNN gets 330 million views a month, NBC and Fox are way bigger.
Factoring in Rogan clips, and media website views. Joe gets 400 million views a month. CNN 800 million, Fox 1.2 billion, 700 million for NBC. So Rogan is gigantic, but not bigger than the big media corporations. 1/2 of CNN though, and 2/3 of NBC. That’s insane.”
Other sources show cable networks drawing about 2-3 million viewers a month.( https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/)
Our busy little thought controller Sadaf Ahsan writes:
“Relatively politically liberal, Rogan has supported Bernie Sanders (though recently shifted his support to President Donald Trump), is pro-choice and believes in more social spending for the working class, but he also regularly gives right-wing commentators the space to share their ideas and often questions issues of LGBT equality. So it’s not all that surprising Rogan is loved by so many and that, as a figure who perpetuates a kind of toxic masculinity – what with his penchant for hunting, MMA fighting, and heteronormative views – he has become a beloved figure particularly in conservative circles that largely thrive online.”
Joe Rogan is a centrist Democrat, a male, a focused martial arts combattant, and a political liberal who likes Trump (sort of). He sounds like a quite typical American male of his generation, and he and millions more like him will secure Trump’s next term as President.
Rebel Yell rightly chides me for my naivety, in that I still think there might be some truth occasionally permitted in the MSM. Maybe there is, but the economics of slime hurling obviously provide more eyeballs than sobriety. The economic incentives of the MSM are skewed towards lies and outrage. Stay away from them.
Social theorist Mark Fisher described from first-hand experience the manipulation of this scene as a Vampire Castle which “feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more marginal, the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampire Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.” The Vampire Castle recruits on the promise of community and self-healing. The reality is an ouroboros of emotional manipulation, stripped of the political and of all that makes life interesting and worthwhile…..
We would have laughed at the idea we formed an elite and we certainly didn’t act like one. But we were the vanguard for a movement that has swept the English-speaking world in the subsequent decade. We still professed to be fighting the old powers — patriarchy, white supremacism, the nuclear family, colonialism, the university itself. But in truth we represented what Christopher Lasch called psychological man, “the final product of bourgeois individualism,” and were being trained in elite formation for the therapeutic age just as surely as our forerunners had been for the previous, paternal age….
The material genesis of the radical cultural politics that has shown its strength in the last few months lies in the overexpansion of higher education, which produced a new middle class that is materially discontented and uncomfortable in its own skin. The globalisation of American pathologies has given this new urban class, present across the Western world, a politics that is carving through our institutions….
