157 Comments

Parents must help children develop their BS detectors to challenge authority from a young age.

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In lower school while I was being indoctrinated into how wonderful our democratic government is, my father "red pilled" me by showing me his taxes, all the money he had to pay to the government, what he could give us if he could keep that money, and how they would throw him in jail and seize his assets if he didn't pay up. Best lesson I ever learned.

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Not to mention how "they" would use that money.

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Actually he went into that too!

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Brilliant

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My husband and I make kids defend their positions. They have lots of opinions (especially in my husband's family). If they air their opinions, we ask how they came to the conclusion and probe how well they understand the entire position and the opposite side (if we know the topic reasonably well). Actually husband's whole male section of the family (and some females) enjoy this game. It makes for fun (sometimes not so fun depending on the person) ways to get kids to think things thru. If you play nicely, they will work hard to win "the argument".

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I'd also add I stay on the lookout for false premises and slight pivots especially when they are cornered by an untenable position. Now that the kids are mostly adults (at least age wise) they are employing the same sort of tactics with the young ones. Also, if they personal attack - they lose. It is a sign of weakness. Why go on?

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This is brilliant

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My father in law did this with his sons (at least with one son)--'define your terms'

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its ironic then that my mother taught me this skill yet followed the narrative like a good german

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My sister did the same. She knew. But now? She welcomed the enemy when they jumped out of the horse with a desperate outstretched arm and blindfolded eyes and masked mouth. I should send her this but why? She has always been an imperious bitch. She enjoys flaying people with her mouth. I’m just one of her victims now. No more. In for a penny……..😁🤔

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Janet , we must be related

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I was about to say the same. My mama taught me that it was wrong for the USSR to limit people's freedom of movement. She taught me to be wary of commercials.

She's self isolated now, almost completely, for 2 years, thinks masks are our way out, and would not see her fully vaxxed grandkids last year, after a nearly 10year gap (we live far apart and are not wealthy).

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I’m sorry. Truly. Something has happened to peoples brains. I believe there is a satan. This whole thing is the plan from the very beginning. Destroy humans —by any means necessary.

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So sorry- for you and her. Love of your fellow human beings SHOULD be stronger than fear but I guess isn't.

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they are master manipulators, use fear to cloud good judgment.

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Now here's the opening to a really long conversation, right?

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its not so long really, she was an NHS nurse and was fed bs for many many years

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Not exactly a "like" but you get my meaning.

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Except a lot of parents would see that as arming the kids to, you know, challenge them...

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Which it is.

I am suggesting to my wee granddaughter (she's 1), that she needs to be a dragon-slayer. Her mother is aware, LOL

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gato, your posts make me feel less lonely in this madness. That is exactly what I hammer into my kid - “see how they made this ad? See how they shot this scene? Look behind, it’s all very fake.” It helps that I worked in communications and now on TV, I can tell her what happens behind the scenes. So far, she loves it. Fingers crossed she’ll grow up into a questioning adult.

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Actually in my opinion there's one more very important thing every parent should point out to their kids:

For girls: disney or any other love romance is a movie. Fake. Made up.

For boys: porn is a movie. Fake. Made up.

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You say "questioning adult".

Prime Minstrel Blackface says "a fringe minorty with unacceptable views."

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…so be it, fringe it is :)

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Mom would say, 'if they jumped off the brooklyn bridge would you follow"?

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I have used that line many times with my kids.

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I was a questioning kid like that--sometimes, they said I was an argumentative kid! I'm glad that I am like that--I think it has saved my life!

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And I feel better knowing that there are people like you out there. Keep teaching your children well, Francesca!

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The left thrives on equivocation:

- Your speech is violence, my violence is speech

- Your rights are privilges, my privileges are rights

- Your truth is relative, my relative take is truth

- Your worldview is an oppressive metanarratve, my metanarrative is the correct worldview

- Your hatred is bad, my hatred is good

- Your virtue is a deception, my deception is a virtue

Wow, I could continue this all day. I'm going to stop now.

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🙌 Amen! --- Rules for me and rules for thee.

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Nowadays when my kids see an ad for a toy, they just press “Skip Ad”. My, how the times have changed.

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In California, a state legislator has introduced a bill, SB 1100, that would allow local legislative bodies to prevent "disruption" by silencing and ejecting speakers, or even clearing the entire audience and continuing an "open session" behind a locked door with no one watching. The bill was introduced behind the short title "Public meetings; orderly conduct."

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB1100

The sell is that anti-LGBT speakers, absolute mean NAZIS!!!!, have been "bullying" a suburban city council in the Bay Area:

https://www.ktvu.com/news/whats-being-done-to-protect-los-gatos-mayor-who-is-bullied-harassed-at-meetings

It's exactly what you've described here. We need the power to silence you, because of the evil bigots! You're not in favor of EVIL BIGOTS, are you!?!?

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Brilliant!! We did this with our gullible, greedy 4-year old granddaughter who was lusting over the current thing and you could see the wonder and lust for the toy drain from her little face and be replaced by an old soul's cynicism. And you're correct; it became a game from that moment on. "Marketing," she'd say, looking bored, and then she would do something else. She has become a discerning, intelligent young adult who, as far as I know, has fallen for nothing. She has outwitted her university and never received the vaccine despite taking in-person classes and playing on a varsity sports team. Of course, she is a conservative. That early eye-opening lesson has served her well. It has become the stuff of legends in our home, as well.

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"then, one day, you try to protest a school board for muzzling your children in class and they silence you, bar you from discourse, and, in all too predictable fashion, brand you as a fascist and a nazi and as a domestic terrorist."

Or you stage a massive, peaceful, inclusive protest on behalf of OTHERS' rights and freedoms, and they not only brand you a fascist, a racist, and a terrorist, but then they pass a post facto law making your peaceful protest illegal, and THEN they summarily and without one iota of due process confiscate your money and your property. See: Canada, and the POS human debris Justin Trudeau.

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You're on a roll today! 👍Edited to correct spelling.

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First thing is I need to congratulate your grandparents or celebrate their blessed memory because they must have done an extraordinary job raising your parents. This kind of wisdom ain't found in the bargain section.

I didn't have such parents but I did have the experience of grappling with the (news of the) Nazis marching in Skokie being defended by the ACLU and having to think really hard about that situation.

And imagine, here we are with the current iteration of the ACLU demanding we say men are women or else be burned at the stake. Things degrade quickly fer shure. And everyone's captured. I started watching Fox News last year or so after being driven by idiocy from MSNBC and CNN, and everyone--everyone, including even Tucker Carlson, refer to Caitlyn Jenner and Lia Thomas as "she" and "her" in discussing the encroachment of men in women's sports. (First typed "biological" and then realized what even I was doing here. See how bad it it?)

I mean, would Fox fire them or reprimand them if they don't conform to this now? What is compelling this conformity even in what we'd call a hostile-to-the-concept environment?

Anyway, a wonderful post and ought to be distributed to every fifth grade classroom so they can save their little siblings.

But the training on willful blindness started so many centuries ago and in some of the most intellectual quarters. I won't go further 'cause I don't want to start a firefight.

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I think about the Nazis and Skokie all the time. "You have to let the Nazis march in Skokie" is a sort of a mantra for my friend and I, especially when what we would like to see happen to the individuals or institutions in question cannot even be expressed with decency. However I failed very badly in this principle when they banned Trump from Twitter, so it is not just the young, it is eternal vigilance for all of us. I've often thought there should be a high school course on how to evade used car salesmen, advertising and politicians. This would be a great beginning!

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I am a Gen X liberal. The ACLU’s defense of Nazi’s was taught in my school, and it was presented as the cornerstone of an understanding of free speech and civil rights in the US. I took those lessons to heart.

Now, liberal civil rights are being redefined as conservative values. It makes me realize I’m getting old. I’ve tried to understand the current progressive movement, but the values seem to be nearly the opposite of what I came to value as a child. They also seem destructive and hypocritical.

At least I have El Gato to reaffirm my faith in my values while showing me cute pictures of cats.

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We're living in the You are There tv show. Build a Better Genocide in a few easy lessons.

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It's simple, really. All censorship is bad.

I watched the Bill Maher episode where he had on Milo Yiannopoulos as the opening guest, and Maher just sat there and asked questions, neutrally, and let Milo make an absolute fool of himself in front of millions.

That's how you do it.

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Regarding free speech in today's world: I am often dumbfounded by the amount of people who choose be be offended by something and advocate for shutting it down in an age where there are literally thousands of TV channels and millions of websites. Umm... aren't we allowed to just turn the channel? Last time I checked no one is forcing anyone to read, watch or follow something that offends them.

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They're not really offended. They're outraged they can't control you. HS cliques writ large.

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🎯

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"this should be taught in school, but instead, they teach the opposite and seek to maximize indoctrination and inculcation"

And what is the following thing to protect right after securing free speech?

Public education or any involvement of the government on education should be absolutely eliminated. It was also sold as something that was necessary because otherwise some parents would not be able to educate their sons ... which is so false that it hurts me whenever any of my friends say it (all do).

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They say, "this should be taught in school," because they're too lazy, or stupid, to teach it to their own children at home. They have many, many excuses for not doing it themselves, that all boil down to, them not wanting to be bothered being parents. Sex ed is one example. Morals, ethics, and conscience are 3 more. <--- Is this because they themselves have none of these? They are severely lacking in the majority of people, IMO. i.e. Do something wrong and blame someone else or deny knowledge. Edited to add ethics and wording accordingly.

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I just finished reading, “Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto. He touches on the history of compulsory schooling. It’s an eye opener. My kids will never set foot in another public school.

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Began public school teaching in mid-70's, retired for two decades, returned two decades ago to an entirely different form of education---yes, I myself witnessed the dumbing down of education. Sickening. A handful of students were aware and appreciative of teachers who did not dumb down. Only a handful.

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Free speech is like pregnancy--you either are or you aren't. No middle ground.

Some times free speech is destroyed by a "positive" goal--slamming the door on anyone who denies the Holocaust, for example. It includes such disparate people as those who deny anything happened, those who say that maybe 3 million, not 6 million Jews perished, and even those who try to include the tens of millions of others who died at the hands of Nazi Germany (see Prof Norman Davies who was denied tenure at Stanford for having the temerity to open up discussion to this possibility.)

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the thing about mass murder is that (in the study of it) you quickly get to the point where the numbers, the "count" is among the least important questions; does 5 rather than 6 makes us feel 16% better about what happened? Actually the "6" was a figure Eichmann pulled out of his hat during his trail in Jerusalem; last I looked, some scholars think "5" may be more accurate. Same goes for the 1930-32 Holmador in Ukraine - "count" issues are even murkier (National Socialists kept much better records! - "No one was keeping count" Krushchev - in the thick of the action as a young man - later said.) - Conquest said 5 million just in Ukraine - just from famine ("dekulakization" is a different count!) - but it seems more recent scholarship (Mark Levine) thinks it was rather lower - but he also quickly goes on to the "so what?" point I started with.

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This one-sided narrative was the mass formation psychosis of the post-WWII generation, and the main precedent for the campaigns against liberty that are metastasizing today. In school in the 1960s, we were taught the mantra that Adolf Hitler murdered five million Jews in gas chambers. This was a substantive thesis that could be challenged and debated in several different dimensions, including the culpability of Hitler, the number who died, and the cause of death. A few independent thinkers did so, and by the 1970s were developing sophisticated arguments that the imposed narrative was substantially a tissue of self-serving lies.

It was at this time that the defenders of the narrative began to use the term "the Holocaust" as their starting point, as a way of side-lining their critics. By wrapping up an entire domain of historical experience under a single undefined reference term that presumed their own interpretation in general, they fuzzed up the questions so as to relieve themselves of having to justify its underlying assertions in the specific. By prefixing the word with "the", their complex and highly dubious atrocity narrative was framed as a unitary fact that was beyond dispute.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, free speech died in most of the Western world, as the promoters of the narrative were able, in country after country, to criminalize "Holocaust denial" and tar any opposition to their story as "hate". Many of the leading critics ended up in jail, and their movement was mostly suppressed by the mid 1990s. The United States was spared direct legal persecution of dissenters, thanks to its Constitution and First Amendment, which still had some force then. But since that time, our government, schools, and mass media have had little good to say about freedom of speech, and have been training the younger generation rather in the need to stamp out "hate speech".

The black legend against Nazi Germany has served primarily Jewish partisans, including particularly Zionists engaged in their own project of ethnic cleansing. It is also used more opportunistically by anyone who came out on top of WWII, or who can claim some political difference with Hitler, whether communist, democrat, libertarian, Christian, LGBT, or non-German nationalist. Now, as the Nazi dream fades into history and the Zionist dream goes rancid, and the WWII victors' moral pretentions openly crumble, the "Holocaust" too becomes less relevant. Its main significance post-2019 will be its legacy of political fanaticism and its leading role in the destruction of freedom of speech.

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Interesting comment.

What one book would you advise reading that explores the argument against the official Holocaust narrative? Of course, a serious book--citing sources and analyzing data, not something sloppily put together.

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Probably "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century", by Arthur Butz, 1974 I think, would be the best single book. The writing is a bit thick, and I haven't actually read it through yet myself, but it's the one that really catalyzed the Holocaust Revisionist movement in the later 1970s.

From 1979 to the early 1990s, he and other Holocaust skeptics held annual conferences to present scholarly talks that were then published in their "Journal of Historical Review". I was following the issue closely at the time, and read most of their articles, if not all of their books. I remember that Butz won my respect for being a stickler on adhering to scholarly ethics and caution.

The field is wide, and a significant literature was published during that time, of varying quality, much of it apparently quite good. Of course, they were black-balled from the beginning, so they were deprived of the benefit of honest engagement and peer review from professional historians. As I recall, though, virtually all of their books and papers contained plentiful citation, and normally analyzed their data to make an argument.

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Thanks, the Wiki entry for the book is brief and doesn't spend a sentence explaining Butz' work (a prof at Northwestern U.) Of course, it's been banned by Amazon, and I can't find it on other used books website.

Clearly, something happened to the Jews of Europe. They were discriminated against, tossed out of Germany, and then placed in ghettos/concentration camps. Tens of millions of other Europeans were murdered too, though, and they deserve to be remembered too.

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Yes, I don't think any of the Revisionists I read would have claimed that nothing happened. Certainly, there was a brutal ethnic cleansing that wiped out the eastern European Jewish community as such, and many Jews died as a consequence. The Revisionists weren't so much disputing the suffering of the victims, as they were rejecting the maximalist demonization of the Germans or Nazis. They would also agree with you about the lopsidedness of focusing so exclusively on the Jews, to the exclusion of the tens of millions of other people who died in that war.

The "classical" Holocaust narrative solidified in the early 1960s as a three-part assertion: 1) Hitler and his government had a plan and a policy to physically exterminate the Jews; 2) The primary means of this extermination was mass gassing in homocidal gas chambers; and 3) The total number of Jews killed was about six million, including about four million in gas chambers.

The Revisionists counter that: 1) There was never any such plan or policy, no such order by Hitler, and no contemporary German documentation of any program to kill people for being Jewish. But there was a program, once the war started, to round up, isolate, and control the Jewish population for security reasons, and a plan to expel them from German-controlled Europe after the war; 2) The gas chamber story was pretty much a complete lie, which began to be planted in the United States press a few weeks after America entered the war, and circulated among the Allies as standard hate propaganda against the Germans from there on. The Germans did use the Zyklon-B HCN gas in the usual way, as an insecticide, to kill the lice that carried the typhus that was a major killer in the concentration camps; 3) The total number of Jews who died of all causes during the war was closer to one or two million than to six million, and probably none of them died in gas chambers.

That's the core of the argument, as I understand it. If we remove from the first one the four million Jews allegedly murdered in gas chambers so secretly that the operation left no internal records, then the two theses largely converge.

Another book you might try would be Walter Sanning's "The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry". I ducked his name, and discovered Metapedia, which seems to be a more even-handed version of Wiki. I followed some links under his entry, and found an on-line copy of the book. I think we're allowed to post links here, but just in case, I've thrown in a couple of spaces, and removed the https:// .

codoh. com/library/document/the-dissolution-of-eastern-european-je wry/en/

Sanning is doing a population argument, proposing that the reduced population of Jews in Europe post-war is more the result of emigration than of being killed in place. The writing is easy to read, with plenty of footnotes. I think it represents one of their better books.

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Thanks for the info. I will follow up on Sanning. About a decade ago I was surprised to read in a book by Ian Kershaw that there was no document that signaled the start of the mass slaughter of Jews in the east.

Hopefully, if truth reasserts itself in this post-truth world, an investigation into this episode of history will take place. If not, we'll have to hope for a curious Chinese scholar to lift up and look under the rocks.

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Climate change is next. Everything they want to accomplish is based on the premise of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Only "science" that supports the premise gets funded. Real science is abandoned as a result. The full-court press for acquiescence to the narrative starts in pre-school. Its adherents are now fixed in the boards of directors for industry. The goal is to destroy that god-damned annoying US constitution, which repeatedly steps in the path of globalist progress.

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I expect you watch John Robson's Climate Discussion Nexus--and Tony Heller as well?

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Our schools are captured by corporations who want them to churn out cogs that can be bought and inserted into their corporate machines. The resilience our schools used to have to resist this corporate push has disintegrated because we, as a society, have told highly competent women that fields like finance and engineering were more honorable than teaching. We eliminated competition in education by encouraging the best teachers to go into other fields. We've devalued the aspects of society that made our schools great. All of this was done with good intentions (another Trojan horse if you will) but has had dire consequences.

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okay your first mistake as a youngster was saying "I want that" instead of "I need that"! :-) JK- I had parents who saw through the hype and passed it on by making most of my "I wants"- including bikes from several gathered at the local dump (there were some great bikes assembled from three or more!) I made a game with my daughter about her "wanting" vs "needing" something. A great rule of thumb in our family is writing it down and then going back a week later and seeing how great your "need" (want) is. Short-lived most times. Funny thing is I have 3 siblings who have NEVER caught onto this and interestingly enough fell into the very thing you continue to talk about- instantly jumping on the latest band wagon because "he/she/expert said so", and pointing fingers at those who DO question, and never seeing how in the long run they will not be immune to the imposed rules? How do people from the same family grow up to have such different mindsets and ability to actually think things out? Guess we will never know...

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I'm old so my Mom would have us sit down with a Sears mail order magazine and circle all of the things we thought we wanted and then in a week we were allowed to see what we thought we wanted. In almost every case we ended up crossing out almost everything we circled. I didn't understand it at the time, but man! Thank you Mom for teaching us that there's more to life than materialism, decadence and pop culture.

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Oh yes the circles around objects pictured in the Sears catalogue! Right there with you in age (and wisdom!) P.S. The ballet tutus sewed by mom probably lasted twice as long. Went well with my cowboy boots, hat and gun (not a ghost gun).

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We did that around a card table with sears and monkey wards. We usually got one of what was circled. And could have been used or a knock off. Still happy. I always wanted tons of dolls. But I was very young when I figured out my love for the doll and excitement lasted about 3 days. Not sure that tamped down my desires but I remember the thought process.

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I only got to see a Sears catalog when at my grandparents' camp--perhaps once a year. I pored over the catalog, drooled over the dresses for girls. My mother + (other) grandmother made all my clothes--the much-desired 'store-bought' (because that's what all my classmates wore) only came as hand-downs.

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I still wait three days before making any medium-to-large purchase.

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Yes--me too. I am currently planning the purchase of battery powered backpack sprayer, but have spent two days+ in on-line research, discussed pro/con with husband, charted on paper the need/desireability.

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Variance is in-built natural protector at a species level.

Some drink the lake and survive, some die of thirst. Some drink the lake and are snapped up, others survive and fine another. The group doesn't know which is the reality, but the in-built variance protects.

Those rewards and risks apply to many paradigms.

I've had a more difficult life "cutting against the grain" but I might better protect myself and my family from the risks.

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Your conscience is intact. That is a useful thing to keep robust. I’m a person of faith. Stronger now. What are they going to threaten me with? Heaven?

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My parents told me to look at it in the store window. I got money weekly. Every time I went by it lost a bit of its luster and by the time my money reached I did no longer want it.

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A slightly different tactic is to treat something as a given when it is not. I keep hearing Ukraine is good, the government is a shining star, Zelenski is a freedom fighter as the bases for the argument they are about to make for say... justification to do something the American people would generally disapprove of. But we can do this because we defend good. So perhaps we could call it Noble Purpose Lie. Ditto for global warming. They use it there too. You may not question the "fact". I hear people around me repeat it. I call bullshit on it and then point to a few actual truths about Ukraine that are not at all gloriously freedomy. Sometimes it shuts them up, sometimes they note my stance so they can write me up in the Commie notebook (you know, the one they have been so happy to be in with their Maoist notions, but now... UKRAINE!).

I like Ukrainians. But their government aint the bastion of freedom.

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yes ... it's always the "noting of stance" moment that's so ominous in these encounters.

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El gato malo is on FIRE! Vacation really recharged your rhetorical batteries.

“For if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.”

Murray Rothbard

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