What could be a better way to find and create useful idiots than to offer insane university degrees to people who need remedial reading classes just to get in? The people who self select by taking out massive debt to get the degrees?
Make sure to feed them a steady stream of anger while they pursue their “studies”. And give them a ready scapegoat to blame when they graduate and find their degrees are worthless. To cement the deal, make sure the student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
An army of useful idiots chomping at the bit to start the revolution.
overproduction of of self percieved elites is a classic play in this book. they feel entitled to a high status that they cannot attain on merit and thus are both embittered and dependent. easiest people in the world to whip up against an enemy by simply saying "those people are the reason you are not getting all the wealth and power you deserve."
the debt slavery aspect of it is new though and a nasty set of additional shackles.
So, let’s reduce the number of ‘institutes of higher education’. Let’s reinstate community colleges to teach practical subjects and give practical degrees. Let’s force them all to pay their own way and end the Government subsidy. Let’s tax the endowments to cover any losses in student lending.
let's just restore the right for companies to use IQ and direct aptitude tests for hiring again. that will flush out the university system like draino.
End federal student loans and make the schools responsible for any loan defaults and I think we’d find the schools newly reluctant to lend six figures to anyone wanting a gender studies degree.
"New"? How new is new? The U.S. Civil War, 1860 - 1865, was fought to end legalized chattel & bondage slavery, and more so to cement wage & debt slavery....
The SORE LOSER Southern Democrats haven't got the memo....
Re-read Article IV, Section 4, U.S. Constitution, & the 13th Amendment....
Even Technocracy, with digital payments & a cashless economy, won't change the underlying system....Please correct & educate me, if you think I'm wrong here....
i think you're basically generating word and concept salad in some sort of determined effort to force a specific claim into some sort of hobbyhorse box you favor.
using debt funded education to shackle overproduced elites is a new tactic. nothing you have said even addresses much less refutes this.
(and no, the civil war was not fought to end slavery, that was incidental. it was fought over the right to tax states (by force) and the north imposing tariffs on the south to pay for northern infrastructure.)
I feel like I'm trying to "argue" WITH YOU, and you're misunderstanding me, and thus trying to argue AGAINST me....I realize that cats are carnivores, so perhaps that explains your distaste for my fresh, locally-grown, organic word salad. Or maybe you should just cough up that hairball that's stuck in your craw? Why digress to a scolding over shallower & deeper dives into mid-1800's Global Geopolitical wars? If I myself were a cat, I'd be a cross between Manx & Maine Coon....double-tongue paws and all....meow-out....
We digressed off on the "slavery" tangent. Regardless of WHY the Civil War was ACTUALLY fought, bondage & chattel slavery DID END, but wage & debt slavery continue to this day.... And, recursively, the Masters were themselves slaves to the enslavement of those they enslaved....but they were too stupid & evil to recognize that reality....
Bill - If you are aware enough to be following el gato you should know better than to believe that the so-called Civil War (1861-1865, btw) was fought to end slavery. Lincoln, when he launched his invasion, repeatedly said he was trying to preserve the union and didn't care about ending slavery. The Crittenden Resolution (also known as the War Aims Resolution) passed by a predominantly northern Congress, defined the Union’s limited war aims -- preserving the union, not ending slavery. We should all be fighting the "slavery" narrative as hard as we fought the Covid narrative.
Slavery had had its run. It became apparent that if you paid people a small wage and had them house and feed themselves, you could tax those houses and the food. They would have to pay for healthcare to treat their injuries and effects of the polluted air the breathed. Let us not forget the booze they drank to self medicate from the dreary hamster wheel lives they were living. And the big plus was that it all could be applied to everyone, not just to specific races or immigrants. Next up = class envy. Now they have someone to blame giving cover for the Owner Class.
"Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals. originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs."
Atlas held up the sky, not the world. Rand was wrong about that.
I never understood why he didn't rest the sky on the mountain top that Heracles stood upon. The sky would have only been about six or seven feet lower, but other than Atlas, nobody would have noticed.
He might have had to walk the earth stoop shouldered, but he would have been free.
Thank-you, THANK-YOU! You got it! Really!....& thank-you for correcting my mixed metaphors. And, you taking hold of my comment, and running with it, is EXACTLY the kind of mental exercise that is so sorely needed!
I'd say that Rand is TOO well-known to a too-small audience, and too much less well-known to a larger audience. And, she is too widely, too much MIS-UNDERSTOOD. Rand's work has always been more confusing than clarifying to me.And I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake on her part, to get so deep into the "in crowd" she partied with....just my take on things....
“You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled:) for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers.” Captain John Smith, Governor of the Jamestown Colony, 1608
I'm saying Ecclesiastes is correct. I'm saying the way is straight and narrow that leads to Goode Things and Most of US Are in Deep Sheeit lest we Unfucketh Ourselves Straight Away. But either way... https://mises.org/mises-daily/isaiahs-job
Solzhenitsyn eloquently made the same point in his writings: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. . . Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”
I think the vast mass of men are better explained by Vaclav Havel's "greengrocer" in "The Power of of the Powerless."
To be clear: I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that those who are motivated by the esteem and praise of others, those with some little ambition, the petit bourgeoisie, need the fig leaf that they're "good." Solzhenitsyn gets that and the quote covers it perfectly. But ideology also helps the low, those who aspire to little and are looking for an excuse to hide their cowardice.
Havel explained their use of ideology perfectly (for me). Ideology "helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology." Same thing, really.
"The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocers superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers."
Naaah - My disdain for Tankies and Commies is not pessimism for Humanity, nor any individual. We've always had collectivists and those who know how to manipulate the masses of men. That it's a recurring problem, however, does suggest something worth considering... I always re-energize myself with a reading of Nock's "Isaiah's Job."
Normal isn't coming back unless people get off their asses and start resisting, because i can assure you that what they have planned is far far worse than anything theyve already done.
Normal isn't coming back for the country, period - we passed that tipping point some time ago. You may be able to impact your local area, unless you live in a blue hellhole, but probably best to remember the tune Silent Running - " teach the children quietly for someday sons and daughters, will rise up while we stood still." The next crusades, like the first, will play out over decades.
It’s been so long. What is normal? In order to recall it, I have to go back 40 years. Is my hindsight 20/20 now, or are the glasses I wear to look back to then, rose tinted?
So, Ryan, "I must resist (somehow) the "RESIST!" of the "woke"/Democrats/leftists/anti-Trumpers, etc.... Something like that. I might say to them,: "I am the resistance to YOUR resistance." I'm trying to avoid thinking about how bad what they have already planned is, much less how much worse it's going to get....BECAUSE, I must ALSO hold firmly to the belief that it is ALSO GETTING BETTER!... We can not win with a negative defeatist attitude, and we cannot lose with a winning positive attitude....
Eventually, they will lose, and we will win. That I know...
"Our Enemy, The State" is worth reading even if you never get beyond the introduction and the first chapter or two. His observations on the loss of social power are keen.
I shared one of James Lindsay’s recent podcasts on facebook where he read directly from the DSA’s platform and I had a friend of mine that I’ve known since middle school who has always been democrat leaning but now is fully radicalized say:
“The arguments made in the link above are all the exact same rehashed lies about fears of helping your neighbor. People don't want to help someone unless that someone is helping them and I think that's an illness to deal with. I don't care about his endless made up rants about things that aren't true. The whole world is doing things different than the US and those people are happy. Give up the red scare tactics.”
And
“The DSA has not failed in the past other than being chased out and denigrated by aggressive anti-communism / red scare misinformation and more importantly widespread disinformation. We support Bernie Sanders to this day for good reason. AOC won as a DSA candidate and still maintains a powerful position for good reason. Mamdani won NYC as a DSA member for good reason. They have not taken freedoms away. People can still own and run a business and make money. There's nothing to be afraid of. People will not all suddenly sit at home and ask the government for free money, that's not how this works and nobody has ever advocated that. We do not need capitalism to be encouraged to participate in society, that is a myth and lie. The DSA is proving at every turn that they can and will make the world a better place for more people. For more people to have access to things they need. We do not have to be bound to the lies of Reagan and capitalist propaganda that have taken this country by the throat”
You are afraid to help your neighbor you see! With thinking like this second and third order thinking are out the window. This kind of rhetoric works on Christians who view government spending as a means of loving their neighbors.
Sorry to be blunt, but until you have the ability and weaponized terms to attack the core of your friend's ideological identity, you are just part of the problem. People such as yourself have been rolling over in the face of self-serving leftist arguments for decades, with the result being the ever-increasing wreckage we now have in place of a society.
Tell us what YOU think would be the abilities and weaponized terms that would successfully not only attack the core of that ideological identity, but would reverse its course?
Because there ARE plenty of folks in the public arena who DO have the abilities and weaponized terms and means of communicating broadly...and yet we STILL have millions of useful idiots like Greg's friend.
So tell us what Greg could do to turn the ship around that myriad professional wordsmiths and pundits and scholars have been unable to do?
"...myriad professional wordsmiths and pundits and scholars.."
What a laugh, what a total misrepresentation. Sounds like I touched a nerve, mmmm? Obviously the people you referenced do NOT have the correct methodology, including weaponized terminology, to personally attack the fragile identity of any single woke leftist and shame her into silence. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and western society wouldn't be in such terrible shape. Instead of your vaunted list, the people we actually have today are nothing but clueless conservatives. The nature of conservatism ensures that conservatives have conserved absolutely nothing, not even women's bathrooms.
Regarding good ol' Greg, here's one vector of attack, out of many possibilities he could use if he had more intellectual acumen and courage. Greg berates his friend, by telling him the following...
Like all leftists, the friend's Kneejerk Worship of Equality has degraded his thinking, turning his mind into Conceptual Mush. It also makes him oblivious to his mental state - he's a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Therefore he's stupid, and willfully ignores useful distinctions by making Conflation Fallacies. In this case, he refuses to understand that the right to own a business is not the same as having the right to run it, since the latter is always destroyed by the environment forced down everyone's throats by leftists.
In addition, all of that is coupled with ludicrous factual errors upon which he bases his trite assumptions. It's a way of avoiding reality so that he can marinate in his Idealistic Fantasyland. Finally, Greg should tell his friend that he's disgusted by him, because he's a self-righteous moral cretin, and Greg refuses to listen any further to his lies and Rancid Gaslighting.
I guess Victor Davis Hanson doesn't have the correct methodology, nor the necessary weaponized terminology. That's just one example. There are plenty of other people who make compelling arguments that fail to pierce the thick skulls of people with shit for brains.
Also, the objective is NOT merely to "shame [someone] into silence". The objective is to CHANGE MINDS, to change BEHAVIOR.
As for Greg's recommended "vector of attack", you know nothing of what he may have said in response to his friend's verbal diarrhea.
“Touched a nerve? Don't flatter yourself.” Yes, I do flatter myself, in recommending a methodology against woke leftists that has yet to be tried.
“I guess Victor Davis Hanson doesn't have the correct methodology, nor the necessary weaponized terminology. That's just one example.” You're correct, he doesn't have the correct methodology. VDH is one of the worst. He's a perfect example of useless conservatism, of mealy-mouthed recitation of facts that have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the behavior of leftists. You obviously admire his emasculated approach, which doesn't say much about your intellect or willingness to attack the enemy.
“There are plenty of other people who make compelling arguments that fail to pierce the thick skulls of people with shit for brains.” Plenty of other people? Really? Name them. And please do give us a definition of what you mean by the word 'compelling'. Whatever your definition, it certainly doesn't mean 'effective', since, as I've already stated before, and which you deliberately ignored, is that if these people's arguments were having any effect, then western society wouldn't be in such terrible shape, but the nature of conservatism ensures that conservatives have conserved absolutely nothing, not even women's bathrooms. Either your reading comprehension is poor, or else you pretend an argument doesn't exist when you have no cogent response to make against it. In this case, I suspect the latter.
“Also, the objective is NOT merely to "shame [someone] into silence". The objective is to CHANGE MINDS, to change BEHAVIOR.” You are laboring under a vast misconception. Since you don't understand leftist motivations nor psychology, you erroneously believe you can change their minds. But history proves that you cannot change their minds. That strategy against leftism has been proven over and over again to be wrong. You.Cannot.Change.Their.Minds! Instead, you have to stop them in their tracks, They are the enemy, get it? The only effective strategy is one that stops the enemy from doing what they've been doing, not that makes them your friend. As proof, since your intellectual skills are so poor, you think 'shit for brains' is an effective label for leftists that will somehow 'change their minds'. It proves you haven't even started to perform any analysis of leftist ideology, assuming you can even understand it.
“As for Greg's recommended "vector of attack", you know nothing of what he may have said in response to his friend's verbal diarrhea.” Is Greg your good buddy, your bff? Why in the world are you defending him? If he had any good responses to his leftist friend (how can anyone be friends with a leftist?), then he would have stated them in his comment, instead of just ending it with vague indignation and feckless exasperation.
You refuse to even consider an alternative to what's already been tried and failed, you refuse to even understand my suggested methodology. I would have been happy to discuss the details with you. Instead all you can do is respond like some stubborn ass, for reasons that are unclear except that you are probably dull-witted and must therefore cling to what little you can discern out of a complex situation. You and those like you need to get it through their thick skulls - our society has had more than enough of stupid responses to leftism, because ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THEM HAVE WORKED. Either try something new, or just continue to watch your society swirl down the toilet, while you do nothing but whine and complain.
In closing, you're a perfect example of someone whose mind cannot be changed. That makes you exactly like leftists, i.e. a leftist stooge, someone who gets in the way of fighting the left. Now I've wasted too much time on you, so have a nice day, and buh-bye!
Been hearing for a while about this "Hasan Piker" dude, and that there was some sort of Chicken Little/sky-is-falling controversy over him. But ignored the details among all the noise. Only very recently have I looked deeper into what he's been saying. Now I realize just how DANGEROUS he really is....BUT, if we react in fear, we lose, I'm afraid. But is we RESPOND, with overwhelming WISE love, then we have a much better chance.... He's really very low-intelligence and ignorant, despite his indoctrination/"education"....I most want to know about the puppet masters who are bank-rolling him, and pulling his strings....THEY are the real bad guys... Piker is just a mouthpiece....
Don't you think "suicidal empathy" also has something to do with the fact that we now live in a gynocracy? At least culturally? Women are much more likely to become the useful idiots you describe and are more prone to reflexive empathy devoid of reasoning about second order effects, as evidenced by their voting preferences. I wrote about this a while back: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-real-men-gone-c3b
In my experience, there are just as many deeply stupid women as there are deeply stupid men and, no surprise, as God would have it, sometimes they manage to find each other and procreate. Their kids? Who knows. Dolts have been known to have a bright kid or two, and criminals have been known to have some honorable and hard-working offspring. It's a wacky world out there.
Try this on for size. Real communism can not exist in large scale societies. It can only exist in small scale societies where everybody's survival is bound up with everybody else's and the size of the society does not exceed the Dunbar number of 150 people.
It cannot occur in a large scale technological society where we are not dependent on each other for survival and there are far too many of us for each of us to know and care about everybody else.
The useful idiots power grab you describe can occur in both small and large scale societies.
The history of even smaller communes in the 60s and the 70s was an abysmal track record of failure, which is why they do not generally persist to this day. The exception would be religious communities, and even those have become fewer and far between.
it often fails even at a family level. i suspect it's basically a scaling function until you find a free rider/taker. even one really starts to make the nature of the iterative prisoner';s dilemma faced in such a system go bad.
It sure does often fail even at the family level. The key to it working is 1) Small group a couple hundred people or less, 2) Everyone's survival bound up with everyone else's with no easy or free ride opt-out choices available. 3) Culture adapted to place that has stood the test of time and been the survivor in the face of many failed cultural experiments. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), those conditions don't exist in any meaningful way in todays technologically advanced and interconnected world of 8 billion people.
Their survival was not bound up together. At any time, they could have left, gotten a job or moved back in with mom and dad. They also lacked a place-rooted culture with all of the local knowledge, values, taboos, etc., and stories to reinforce it all. Such cultures only come with time, lots of trial and error and lots of total failures before there are a few successes.
Think instead of a hunter-gatherer or simple agricultural society that has been in one place for a long time and where all of the competing groups failed because they didn't have what it takes and where there is literally nowhere to go. Surviving out in the big wild world, possibly filled with competing groups that just might kill you and even if they don't, where it's very hard to go it alone.
Of course, collapse and maybe a few hundred or a few thousand years to adapt is the only way I can imagine that would get us back there. Essentially every little tribe even in the most remote locations has been contacted by now. So it's really off the table.
Perhaps, it's still useful to think about as some aspects of that may be wired in our biology and available for those unscrupulous leaders to exploit.
Yes, thanks, Steve, agreed, but how do you see it working in an 8,000,000,000 population Globalist New World Order-One World Government of Totalitarian Transhumanist Technocracy? (i.e., "Idiocracy"?)....
I'm afraid that you're correct, but I still prefer to remain HOPEFUL that you're wrong. And, given the now-documented-as-fact, Globalist's "depopulation agenda", it seems the elites agree with you. We need a lot more Buckminster Fuller's than we are currently breeding....and fewer Elon Musks....IMHO....
I don’t see a way to beat this cycle. My question is, how do people on our side of the divide play it? Hoping to convince people by pointing to positive second+ order outcomes is obviously not going to work. If we don’t hook them with first order bait, they will find somebody who will.
Interesting framing in the piece. The “suicidal empathy” diagnosis has a certain elegance: first-order pity as the entry drug, second- and third-order disaster as the payoff, useful idiots sorted by their inability to run the tape forward.
Of course the selector itself is older than the current branding. Hitler and his anti-Marxist and anti-Jewish regime spent a good deal of ink and airtime on precisely this pattern under different labels. "Falsche Humanität" —false humanitarianism—was the preferred term for the soft-headed conviction that every life carries equal weight and that shielding the weak or the “racially impure” somehow counted as virtue rather than a violation of nature’s own bookkeeping. Goebbels popularized "Mitleidsduvelei" (compassion-mongering, sentimental drivel) for the private twinges of pity that led ordinary Germans to help a neighbor; "bürgerliche Sentimentalität" covered the bourgeois softness that lacked the necessary hardness.
The argument ran that nature selects for fitness; any policy or private feeling that interfered with that selection was national self-destruction in slow motion. Empathy toward the designated out-group was therefore not kindness but a biological pathology, a malfunctioning survival instinct that had been successfully hacked. Defenders were not merely naïve; they were, in the regime’s framing, committing a form of soft treason against the collective. The corrective virtue was "Härte"—hardness—explicitly cultivated so that the natural human impulse could be overridden for the larger biological project.
Whether one regards that earlier vocabulary as cautionary precedent or as an unflattering mirror is, naturally, left as an exercise for the reader. The functional resemblance is hard to miss once the labels are set side by side: a first-order moral appeal that feels generous, a second-order outcome that is catastrophic for the host society, and a recruitment filter that preferentially retains those unable (or unwilling) to notice the trap. The rest, as the piece notes, is largely emergent.
I think the current xenophobic strain stems from rather the opposite motivation.
Rather than concern about dilution of some long-debunked racial supremacy, it's driven by fear of the strength of those who may come to our country out of ill rather than goodwill, rather like the sort of people in red states who are not exactly welcoming refugees from blue states with open arms lest they make their new homes into the very progressive hellholes that they fled. The same sentiment was evident during the desegregation upheavals of the ‘60s, a widely suppressed and misunderstood reality.
the boomers were monstrously brainwashed as children. the reflexive response to the horrors of ww2 and the camps and "final solutions" was to basically ban "noticing differences" and a wild overswing into "nurture" dominating nature. the problem is that it's just factually wrong and just sets up as another "first order kindness second order calamity" that allows people to grasp and hold coercive power while styling it virtue and empathy.
this simple memetic framing seems to crop up everywhere as a driver. i think it's testament to just how effective the self-organizing structures it generates are.
the lesson seems to be that "fighting an idea like rent control as a matter of rents" is always going to be a loser. it cedes the premise that keeps the emergent cycle running. we need to move up a frame and simply say "self determination. the state has no right to intervene here."
until we do, this is a losing fight on a slippery slope.
Vermont, especially the poorer rural parts, in recent decades, has seen a huge influx of rich urban professionals from mostly NY, but also CT, NJ, etc....there's a lot of economic dependence and resulting resentment. Here in N.H., we resent the influx of Massholes from Taxachusetts....aren't these 2 State-size domestic examples of the larger, global-scale U.S. problem?....
Would you agree, that ultimately, "suicidal empathy" is ALSO "homicidal empathy", and "genocidal empathy"?.....not to be confused with a simpler concept described as "killing with kindness"....
You don't want the person who is observing and reporting to consider consequence; it clouds the observation.
You want them to accurately observe the *now*. This is a true gift and ability that should not be denigrated. You even need intelligent ones to provide higher resolution observations.
The retardation is encouraging them to act beyond their strategic gifts.
Yes, I was thinking that myself. This also demonstrates why, if you are unfortunate enough to have been assigned this role in a dysfunctional family, the only real recourse you have is to walk away. There will be no real conflict resolution and you will not be able to make them understand when understanding would trigger an existential crisis.
If this continues to take hold, expect the DSA to move quickly if given state or federal control. The recent precedent set in Europe to jail for speech will be the first move. They will do it to "protect" the people, but really to quell dissent and illicit behavior in those emerging second and third order thinkers. Unless logic regains a foothold in places of governance, this could potentially lead to another civil war. In response to speech jailing and suspension of rights for the "greater good", people will start to make decisions with their feet by moving to states with similar held ideals. The DSA useful idiots will flock to their bastions of lunacy. That will set in motion another regional divide, similar to that brewing in the 1850's.
To say this isn't possible due to legal protections of rights, why do you think the DSA wants to abolish the Supreme Court, reduce the influence of the Senate, and replace the executive branch with a house-elected prime minister? So they can run unchecked. They will package it as a "better" democracy, one "truly governed by the people" because the House of Representatives is a direct conduit. However, it is a direct conduit to the mob, not reason. The Senate, the President, and the Supreme Court are there to ensure mob-rule doesn't take hold. Then the House will become the Central Committee and the leaders the Politburo. This isn't hard to see. The Soviets have played the long game. Their subversion of the 1950's through the 1980's has paid massive dividends in recent times. That ground game laid the foundation for what we are seeing today. Bezmenov said the quiet part out loud in 1984 after his defection.
"safety" is a very powerful first order appeal that masks all manner of truly predatory 2nd and 3rd orders. i think masks were incredibly powerful this way.
"your mask protects me" was the most brilliant propaganda of covid. it stole your choice and made it about them. the second order was "no safety added, but a constant sense of crisis and dehumanization" as the pandemic cosplay shouted "this is not normal" every time you went outside and the cognitive dissonance bite of "i would not be doing this unless it were a real crisis" took hold
Another pantomime relict of the pandemic is the propaganda (whoa, that's a lot of P's) of "why must the workers be forced into buildings to make the billionaire real estate owners money?" Because my purple haired friend, in-office work reinforces a community and builds businesses around and in them (security detail, building maintenance, convenience stores, lunch spots, etc.). Remote work breeds disconnection, making hating "the others" easier. The groundwork of this new resurgence of communism really was laid during the Covidian.
Good point!! I hated the Zoom meetings that were forced on us. They made me feel disconnected.
Many people I talked to during that time liked working from home. It helped them escape the accountability of the office.
Some of the best ideas I had with my colleagues happened during impromptu hallway meetings, coffee break get togethers, or brown bag lunch meetings in the break room.
100%. When humans are together it drives innovation. I took a Wharton leadership seminar back in 2017 and one of the greatest things I learned from that was the following:
Instructor wheeled out a cart of Legos. Ask for two volunteers (I was one). Strapped them into heart rate monitors.
1. First exercise: Asked each individual to build a car on their own. Watched heart rates, out of sync, no relation, nothing. Two individuals.
2. Second exercise: Asked both individuals to come to the same side of the cart and build a car together. Within 30 seconds, heart rates sync and beats regulate. Mind blown.
Humans together can achieve more than humans apart. It's literally in our physiology.
This is why people who aren't convinced that the world is about to burst into flame because of a modest increase in a certain atmospheric trace gas are called "deniers," by climate fanatics. First, it has a religious ring. Second, it links them to Holocaust deniers, who ARE odious. The labeling signals that the targets are deviant, on the level of child rapists, therefore exempt from the usual considerations. You may do what you want with them.
What could be a better way to find and create useful idiots than to offer insane university degrees to people who need remedial reading classes just to get in? The people who self select by taking out massive debt to get the degrees?
Make sure to feed them a steady stream of anger while they pursue their “studies”. And give them a ready scapegoat to blame when they graduate and find their degrees are worthless. To cement the deal, make sure the student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
An army of useful idiots chomping at the bit to start the revolution.
overproduction of of self percieved elites is a classic play in this book. they feel entitled to a high status that they cannot attain on merit and thus are both embittered and dependent. easiest people in the world to whip up against an enemy by simply saying "those people are the reason you are not getting all the wealth and power you deserve."
the debt slavery aspect of it is new though and a nasty set of additional shackles.
and they somehow don't blame the universities that did it to them.
So, let’s reduce the number of ‘institutes of higher education’. Let’s reinstate community colleges to teach practical subjects and give practical degrees. Let’s force them all to pay their own way and end the Government subsidy. Let’s tax the endowments to cover any losses in student lending.
let's just restore the right for companies to use IQ and direct aptitude tests for hiring again. that will flush out the university system like draino.
End federal student loans and make the schools responsible for any loan defaults and I think we’d find the schools newly reluctant to lend six figures to anyone wanting a gender studies degree.
"New"? How new is new? The U.S. Civil War, 1860 - 1865, was fought to end legalized chattel & bondage slavery, and more so to cement wage & debt slavery....
The SORE LOSER Southern Democrats haven't got the memo....
Re-read Article IV, Section 4, U.S. Constitution, & the 13th Amendment....
Even Technocracy, with digital payments & a cashless economy, won't change the underlying system....Please correct & educate me, if you think I'm wrong here....
i think you're basically generating word and concept salad in some sort of determined effort to force a specific claim into some sort of hobbyhorse box you favor.
using debt funded education to shackle overproduced elites is a new tactic. nothing you have said even addresses much less refutes this.
(and no, the civil war was not fought to end slavery, that was incidental. it was fought over the right to tax states (by force) and the north imposing tariffs on the south to pay for northern infrastructure.)
I feel like I'm trying to "argue" WITH YOU, and you're misunderstanding me, and thus trying to argue AGAINST me....I realize that cats are carnivores, so perhaps that explains your distaste for my fresh, locally-grown, organic word salad. Or maybe you should just cough up that hairball that's stuck in your craw? Why digress to a scolding over shallower & deeper dives into mid-1800's Global Geopolitical wars? If I myself were a cat, I'd be a cross between Manx & Maine Coon....double-tongue paws and all....meow-out....
We digressed off on the "slavery" tangent. Regardless of WHY the Civil War was ACTUALLY fought, bondage & chattel slavery DID END, but wage & debt slavery continue to this day.... And, recursively, the Masters were themselves slaves to the enslavement of those they enslaved....but they were too stupid & evil to recognize that reality....
Bill - If you are aware enough to be following el gato you should know better than to believe that the so-called Civil War (1861-1865, btw) was fought to end slavery. Lincoln, when he launched his invasion, repeatedly said he was trying to preserve the union and didn't care about ending slavery. The Crittenden Resolution (also known as the War Aims Resolution) passed by a predominantly northern Congress, defined the Union’s limited war aims -- preserving the union, not ending slavery. We should all be fighting the "slavery" narrative as hard as we fought the Covid narrative.
Thank you
Slavery had had its run. It became apparent that if you paid people a small wage and had them house and feed themselves, you could tax those houses and the food. They would have to pay for healthcare to treat their injuries and effects of the polluted air the breathed. Let us not forget the booze they drank to self medicate from the dreary hamster wheel lives they were living. And the big plus was that it all could be applied to everyone, not just to specific races or immigrants. Next up = class envy. Now they have someone to blame giving cover for the Owner Class.
Then WHY are you NOT using the MORE correct "Covid1984", for the plandemic-scamdemic?....
BTW, thanks for the history refresher, but you dove much deeper than I intended....
"Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals. originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs."
Ayn Rand
Atlas held up the sky, not the world. Rand was wrong about that.
I never understood why he didn't rest the sky on the mountain top that Heracles stood upon. The sky would have only been about six or seven feet lower, but other than Atlas, nobody would have noticed.
He might have had to walk the earth stoop shouldered, but he would have been free.
Thank-you, THANK-YOU! You got it! Really!....& thank-you for correcting my mixed metaphors. And, you taking hold of my comment, and running with it, is EXACTLY the kind of mental exercise that is so sorely needed!
I'd say that Rand is TOO well-known to a too-small audience, and too much less well-known to a larger audience. And, she is too widely, too much MIS-UNDERSTOOD. Rand's work has always been more confusing than clarifying to me.And I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake on her part, to get so deep into the "in crowd" she partied with....just my take on things....
100%
Every. Single. Time.
History is like a dream where a broken record is skipping, endlessly, in the background, and no one can move the needle or turn the player off.
Well 'splained, Senor Gato.
So what you're saying is no meteor required for extinction
“You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled:) for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers.” Captain John Smith, Governor of the Jamestown Colony, 1608
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
I'm saying Ecclesiastes is correct. I'm saying the way is straight and narrow that leads to Goode Things and Most of US Are in Deep Sheeit lest we Unfucketh Ourselves Straight Away. But either way... https://mises.org/mises-daily/isaiahs-job
Solzhenitsyn eloquently made the same point in his writings: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. . . Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”
I think the vast mass of men are better explained by Vaclav Havel's "greengrocer" in "The Power of of the Powerless."
To be clear: I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that those who are motivated by the esteem and praise of others, those with some little ambition, the petit bourgeoisie, need the fig leaf that they're "good." Solzhenitsyn gets that and the quote covers it perfectly. But ideology also helps the low, those who aspire to little and are looking for an excuse to hide their cowardice.
Havel explained their use of ideology perfectly (for me). Ideology "helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology." Same thing, really.
"The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocers superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers."
Ahhhhh, the sweet & indolent strains of pre-destined defeatism....music to soothe my whiskers....
Naaah - My disdain for Tankies and Commies is not pessimism for Humanity, nor any individual. We've always had collectivists and those who know how to manipulate the masses of men. That it's a recurring problem, however, does suggest something worth considering... I always re-energize myself with a reading of Nock's "Isaiah's Job."
Normal isn't coming back unless people get off their asses and start resisting, because i can assure you that what they have planned is far far worse than anything theyve already done.
Normal isn't coming back for the country, period - we passed that tipping point some time ago. You may be able to impact your local area, unless you live in a blue hellhole, but probably best to remember the tune Silent Running - " teach the children quietly for someday sons and daughters, will rise up while we stood still." The next crusades, like the first, will play out over decades.
It’s been so long. What is normal? In order to recall it, I have to go back 40 years. Is my hindsight 20/20 now, or are the glasses I wear to look back to then, rose tinted?
So, Ryan, "I must resist (somehow) the "RESIST!" of the "woke"/Democrats/leftists/anti-Trumpers, etc.... Something like that. I might say to them,: "I am the resistance to YOUR resistance." I'm trying to avoid thinking about how bad what they have already planned is, much less how much worse it's going to get....BECAUSE, I must ALSO hold firmly to the belief that it is ALSO GETTING BETTER!... We can not win with a negative defeatist attitude, and we cannot lose with a winning positive attitude....
Eventually, they will lose, and we will win. That I know...
THANK-YOU, THANK-YOU, THANK-YOU....for introducing me to Nock....Even the googleAI overview was reassuring & inspiring to me.....
"Our Enemy, The State" is worth reading even if you never get beyond the introduction and the first chapter or two. His observations on the loss of social power are keen.
I shared one of James Lindsay’s recent podcasts on facebook where he read directly from the DSA’s platform and I had a friend of mine that I’ve known since middle school who has always been democrat leaning but now is fully radicalized say:
“The arguments made in the link above are all the exact same rehashed lies about fears of helping your neighbor. People don't want to help someone unless that someone is helping them and I think that's an illness to deal with. I don't care about his endless made up rants about things that aren't true. The whole world is doing things different than the US and those people are happy. Give up the red scare tactics.”
And
“The DSA has not failed in the past other than being chased out and denigrated by aggressive anti-communism / red scare misinformation and more importantly widespread disinformation. We support Bernie Sanders to this day for good reason. AOC won as a DSA candidate and still maintains a powerful position for good reason. Mamdani won NYC as a DSA member for good reason. They have not taken freedoms away. People can still own and run a business and make money. There's nothing to be afraid of. People will not all suddenly sit at home and ask the government for free money, that's not how this works and nobody has ever advocated that. We do not need capitalism to be encouraged to participate in society, that is a myth and lie. The DSA is proving at every turn that they can and will make the world a better place for more people. For more people to have access to things they need. We do not have to be bound to the lies of Reagan and capitalist propaganda that have taken this country by the throat”
You are afraid to help your neighbor you see! With thinking like this second and third order thinking are out the window. This kind of rhetoric works on Christians who view government spending as a means of loving their neighbors.
your friend is an idiot.
I was thinking something less polite but idiot will do….and won’t get me banned
🤣 must have just watched Meet John Doe on TCM. Recommend Doctor Zhivago.
Sorry to be blunt, but until you have the ability and weaponized terms to attack the core of your friend's ideological identity, you are just part of the problem. People such as yourself have been rolling over in the face of self-serving leftist arguments for decades, with the result being the ever-increasing wreckage we now have in place of a society.
So indulge us.
Tell us what YOU think would be the abilities and weaponized terms that would successfully not only attack the core of that ideological identity, but would reverse its course?
Because there ARE plenty of folks in the public arena who DO have the abilities and weaponized terms and means of communicating broadly...and yet we STILL have millions of useful idiots like Greg's friend.
So tell us what Greg could do to turn the ship around that myriad professional wordsmiths and pundits and scholars have been unable to do?
Please be specific.
"...myriad professional wordsmiths and pundits and scholars.."
What a laugh, what a total misrepresentation. Sounds like I touched a nerve, mmmm? Obviously the people you referenced do NOT have the correct methodology, including weaponized terminology, to personally attack the fragile identity of any single woke leftist and shame her into silence. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and western society wouldn't be in such terrible shape. Instead of your vaunted list, the people we actually have today are nothing but clueless conservatives. The nature of conservatism ensures that conservatives have conserved absolutely nothing, not even women's bathrooms.
Regarding good ol' Greg, here's one vector of attack, out of many possibilities he could use if he had more intellectual acumen and courage. Greg berates his friend, by telling him the following...
Like all leftists, the friend's Kneejerk Worship of Equality has degraded his thinking, turning his mind into Conceptual Mush. It also makes him oblivious to his mental state - he's a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Therefore he's stupid, and willfully ignores useful distinctions by making Conflation Fallacies. In this case, he refuses to understand that the right to own a business is not the same as having the right to run it, since the latter is always destroyed by the environment forced down everyone's throats by leftists.
In addition, all of that is coupled with ludicrous factual errors upon which he bases his trite assumptions. It's a way of avoiding reality so that he can marinate in his Idealistic Fantasyland. Finally, Greg should tell his friend that he's disgusted by him, because he's a self-righteous moral cretin, and Greg refuses to listen any further to his lies and Rancid Gaslighting.
Touched a nerve? Don't flatter yourself.
I guess Victor Davis Hanson doesn't have the correct methodology, nor the necessary weaponized terminology. That's just one example. There are plenty of other people who make compelling arguments that fail to pierce the thick skulls of people with shit for brains.
Also, the objective is NOT merely to "shame [someone] into silence". The objective is to CHANGE MINDS, to change BEHAVIOR.
As for Greg's recommended "vector of attack", you know nothing of what he may have said in response to his friend's verbal diarrhea.
“Touched a nerve? Don't flatter yourself.” Yes, I do flatter myself, in recommending a methodology against woke leftists that has yet to be tried.
“I guess Victor Davis Hanson doesn't have the correct methodology, nor the necessary weaponized terminology. That's just one example.” You're correct, he doesn't have the correct methodology. VDH is one of the worst. He's a perfect example of useless conservatism, of mealy-mouthed recitation of facts that have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the behavior of leftists. You obviously admire his emasculated approach, which doesn't say much about your intellect or willingness to attack the enemy.
“There are plenty of other people who make compelling arguments that fail to pierce the thick skulls of people with shit for brains.” Plenty of other people? Really? Name them. And please do give us a definition of what you mean by the word 'compelling'. Whatever your definition, it certainly doesn't mean 'effective', since, as I've already stated before, and which you deliberately ignored, is that if these people's arguments were having any effect, then western society wouldn't be in such terrible shape, but the nature of conservatism ensures that conservatives have conserved absolutely nothing, not even women's bathrooms. Either your reading comprehension is poor, or else you pretend an argument doesn't exist when you have no cogent response to make against it. In this case, I suspect the latter.
“Also, the objective is NOT merely to "shame [someone] into silence". The objective is to CHANGE MINDS, to change BEHAVIOR.” You are laboring under a vast misconception. Since you don't understand leftist motivations nor psychology, you erroneously believe you can change their minds. But history proves that you cannot change their minds. That strategy against leftism has been proven over and over again to be wrong. You.Cannot.Change.Their.Minds! Instead, you have to stop them in their tracks, They are the enemy, get it? The only effective strategy is one that stops the enemy from doing what they've been doing, not that makes them your friend. As proof, since your intellectual skills are so poor, you think 'shit for brains' is an effective label for leftists that will somehow 'change their minds'. It proves you haven't even started to perform any analysis of leftist ideology, assuming you can even understand it.
“As for Greg's recommended "vector of attack", you know nothing of what he may have said in response to his friend's verbal diarrhea.” Is Greg your good buddy, your bff? Why in the world are you defending him? If he had any good responses to his leftist friend (how can anyone be friends with a leftist?), then he would have stated them in his comment, instead of just ending it with vague indignation and feckless exasperation.
You refuse to even consider an alternative to what's already been tried and failed, you refuse to even understand my suggested methodology. I would have been happy to discuss the details with you. Instead all you can do is respond like some stubborn ass, for reasons that are unclear except that you are probably dull-witted and must therefore cling to what little you can discern out of a complex situation. You and those like you need to get it through their thick skulls - our society has had more than enough of stupid responses to leftism, because ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THEM HAVE WORKED. Either try something new, or just continue to watch your society swirl down the toilet, while you do nothing but whine and complain.
In closing, you're a perfect example of someone whose mind cannot be changed. That makes you exactly like leftists, i.e. a leftist stooge, someone who gets in the way of fighting the left. Now I've wasted too much time on you, so have a nice day, and buh-bye!
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 sounds like my little (68yo) brother
Sorry to hear that Rosemary. When I open my facebook now, it is just full of my friends and family that are democrats rage posting non-stop.
it's amazing how angry they all are...it makes me laugh.
me too. Angry. What a waste of brain matter
yes. It is sad... but okay. I have other things to do anyway. 🙄
That is legitimately scary.
I just can’t get over that his name is “Piker” and no one seems to notice.
first thought 😱😂
So close to Pecker too. 🤣
They would notice even less, if his name was "Hasan Mountebank"....
What a humbug!
Been hearing for a while about this "Hasan Piker" dude, and that there was some sort of Chicken Little/sky-is-falling controversy over him. But ignored the details among all the noise. Only very recently have I looked deeper into what he's been saying. Now I realize just how DANGEROUS he really is....BUT, if we react in fear, we lose, I'm afraid. But is we RESPOND, with overwhelming WISE love, then we have a much better chance.... He's really very low-intelligence and ignorant, despite his indoctrination/"education"....I most want to know about the puppet masters who are bank-rolling him, and pulling his strings....THEY are the real bad guys... Piker is just a mouthpiece....
Don't you think "suicidal empathy" also has something to do with the fact that we now live in a gynocracy? At least culturally? Women are much more likely to become the useful idiots you describe and are more prone to reflexive empathy devoid of reasoning about second order effects, as evidenced by their voting preferences. I wrote about this a while back: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-real-men-gone-c3b
In my experience, there are just as many deeply stupid women as there are deeply stupid men and, no surprise, as God would have it, sometimes they manage to find each other and procreate. Their kids? Who knows. Dolts have been known to have a bright kid or two, and criminals have been known to have some honorable and hard-working offspring. It's a wacky world out there.
Bad Kitty for President!
Try this on for size. Real communism can not exist in large scale societies. It can only exist in small scale societies where everybody's survival is bound up with everybody else's and the size of the society does not exceed the Dunbar number of 150 people.
It cannot occur in a large scale technological society where we are not dependent on each other for survival and there are far too many of us for each of us to know and care about everybody else.
The useful idiots power grab you describe can occur in both small and large scale societies.
The history of even smaller communes in the 60s and the 70s was an abysmal track record of failure, which is why they do not generally persist to this day. The exception would be religious communities, and even those have become fewer and far between.
it often fails even at a family level. i suspect it's basically a scaling function until you find a free rider/taker. even one really starts to make the nature of the iterative prisoner';s dilemma faced in such a system go bad.
It sure does often fail even at the family level. The key to it working is 1) Small group a couple hundred people or less, 2) Everyone's survival bound up with everyone else's with no easy or free ride opt-out choices available. 3) Culture adapted to place that has stood the test of time and been the survivor in the face of many failed cultural experiments. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), those conditions don't exist in any meaningful way in todays technologically advanced and interconnected world of 8 billion people.
Sure enough, which you know oh so well if you have ever worked in a family business, especially, of course, if you are not family.
Their survival was not bound up together. At any time, they could have left, gotten a job or moved back in with mom and dad. They also lacked a place-rooted culture with all of the local knowledge, values, taboos, etc., and stories to reinforce it all. Such cultures only come with time, lots of trial and error and lots of total failures before there are a few successes.
Think instead of a hunter-gatherer or simple agricultural society that has been in one place for a long time and where all of the competing groups failed because they didn't have what it takes and where there is literally nowhere to go. Surviving out in the big wild world, possibly filled with competing groups that just might kill you and even if they don't, where it's very hard to go it alone.
Of course, collapse and maybe a few hundred or a few thousand years to adapt is the only way I can imagine that would get us back there. Essentially every little tribe even in the most remote locations has been contacted by now. So it's really off the table.
Perhaps, it's still useful to think about as some aspects of that may be wired in our biology and available for those unscrupulous leaders to exploit.
Yes, thanks, Steve, agreed, but how do you see it working in an 8,000,000,000 population Globalist New World Order-One World Government of Totalitarian Transhumanist Technocracy? (i.e., "Idiocracy"?)....
As I stated above, I don't see it working in an 8,000,000,000 population of any sort.
I'm afraid that you're correct, but I still prefer to remain HOPEFUL that you're wrong. And, given the now-documented-as-fact, Globalist's "depopulation agenda", it seems the elites agree with you. We need a lot more Buckminster Fuller's than we are currently breeding....and fewer Elon Musks....IMHO....
"....grotesque parfait," pure poetry!
I believe that it's rainbow-flavored grotesque parfait, too....lol
Oh boy this is going to be one heck of a reality show!! 😂
I see mobs of stupid people.
We’ve seen our fill of them already this year demanding that there be “No Kings!” 🙄
Oh my gosh. Just wait until they have all of their lovable democrat socialists in place. hahaha freaking literally SUPER KINGS.
.. and there goes the overton window 🤯
They don’t want “No Kings”. They just want “THEIR Kings”. Just hope those purple haired idiots don’t get their wish. They’ll be the first to go.
There is a lot to think about here.
I need to watch my own habits.
I don’t see a way to beat this cycle. My question is, how do people on our side of the divide play it? Hoping to convince people by pointing to positive second+ order outcomes is obviously not going to work. If we don’t hook them with first order bait, they will find somebody who will.
"Unlike Socialism, true Nazism has never been tried yet"?....something like that? Think about it....
Nazism is just another form of socialism.
Nazi = "NSDAP" = National Socialist German Worker's Party....yeah, so what? Everybody knows that. What's your point?
Not everybody knows that. Like most Democrats don't.
Yup! ....thnx, Alice!
Interesting framing in the piece. The “suicidal empathy” diagnosis has a certain elegance: first-order pity as the entry drug, second- and third-order disaster as the payoff, useful idiots sorted by their inability to run the tape forward.
Of course the selector itself is older than the current branding. Hitler and his anti-Marxist and anti-Jewish regime spent a good deal of ink and airtime on precisely this pattern under different labels. "Falsche Humanität" —false humanitarianism—was the preferred term for the soft-headed conviction that every life carries equal weight and that shielding the weak or the “racially impure” somehow counted as virtue rather than a violation of nature’s own bookkeeping. Goebbels popularized "Mitleidsduvelei" (compassion-mongering, sentimental drivel) for the private twinges of pity that led ordinary Germans to help a neighbor; "bürgerliche Sentimentalität" covered the bourgeois softness that lacked the necessary hardness.
The argument ran that nature selects for fitness; any policy or private feeling that interfered with that selection was national self-destruction in slow motion. Empathy toward the designated out-group was therefore not kindness but a biological pathology, a malfunctioning survival instinct that had been successfully hacked. Defenders were not merely naïve; they were, in the regime’s framing, committing a form of soft treason against the collective. The corrective virtue was "Härte"—hardness—explicitly cultivated so that the natural human impulse could be overridden for the larger biological project.
Whether one regards that earlier vocabulary as cautionary precedent or as an unflattering mirror is, naturally, left as an exercise for the reader. The functional resemblance is hard to miss once the labels are set side by side: a first-order moral appeal that feels generous, a second-order outcome that is catastrophic for the host society, and a recruitment filter that preferentially retains those unable (or unwilling) to notice the trap. The rest, as the piece notes, is largely emergent.
I think the current xenophobic strain stems from rather the opposite motivation.
Rather than concern about dilution of some long-debunked racial supremacy, it's driven by fear of the strength of those who may come to our country out of ill rather than goodwill, rather like the sort of people in red states who are not exactly welcoming refugees from blue states with open arms lest they make their new homes into the very progressive hellholes that they fled. The same sentiment was evident during the desegregation upheavals of the ‘60s, a widely suppressed and misunderstood reality.
the boomers were monstrously brainwashed as children. the reflexive response to the horrors of ww2 and the camps and "final solutions" was to basically ban "noticing differences" and a wild overswing into "nurture" dominating nature. the problem is that it's just factually wrong and just sets up as another "first order kindness second order calamity" that allows people to grasp and hold coercive power while styling it virtue and empathy.
this simple memetic framing seems to crop up everywhere as a driver. i think it's testament to just how effective the self-organizing structures it generates are.
the lesson seems to be that "fighting an idea like rent control as a matter of rents" is always going to be a loser. it cedes the premise that keeps the emergent cycle running. we need to move up a frame and simply say "self determination. the state has no right to intervene here."
until we do, this is a losing fight on a slippery slope.
Vermont, especially the poorer rural parts, in recent decades, has seen a huge influx of rich urban professionals from mostly NY, but also CT, NJ, etc....there's a lot of economic dependence and resulting resentment. Here in N.H., we resent the influx of Massholes from Taxachusetts....aren't these 2 State-size domestic examples of the larger, global-scale U.S. problem?....
Would you agree, that ultimately, "suicidal empathy" is ALSO "homicidal empathy", and "genocidal empathy"?.....not to be confused with a simpler concept described as "killing with kindness"....
Eh. They are scouts.
You don't want the person who is observing and reporting to consider consequence; it clouds the observation.
You want them to accurately observe the *now*. This is a true gift and ability that should not be denigrated. You even need intelligent ones to provide higher resolution observations.
The retardation is encouraging them to act beyond their strategic gifts.
And he will hate you because he harms you. That is a perfect summation of the scapegoating rule.
Yes, I was thinking that myself. This also demonstrates why, if you are unfortunate enough to have been assigned this role in a dysfunctional family, the only real recourse you have is to walk away. There will be no real conflict resolution and you will not be able to make them understand when understanding would trigger an existential crisis.
If this continues to take hold, expect the DSA to move quickly if given state or federal control. The recent precedent set in Europe to jail for speech will be the first move. They will do it to "protect" the people, but really to quell dissent and illicit behavior in those emerging second and third order thinkers. Unless logic regains a foothold in places of governance, this could potentially lead to another civil war. In response to speech jailing and suspension of rights for the "greater good", people will start to make decisions with their feet by moving to states with similar held ideals. The DSA useful idiots will flock to their bastions of lunacy. That will set in motion another regional divide, similar to that brewing in the 1850's.
To say this isn't possible due to legal protections of rights, why do you think the DSA wants to abolish the Supreme Court, reduce the influence of the Senate, and replace the executive branch with a house-elected prime minister? So they can run unchecked. They will package it as a "better" democracy, one "truly governed by the people" because the House of Representatives is a direct conduit. However, it is a direct conduit to the mob, not reason. The Senate, the President, and the Supreme Court are there to ensure mob-rule doesn't take hold. Then the House will become the Central Committee and the leaders the Politburo. This isn't hard to see. The Soviets have played the long game. Their subversion of the 1950's through the 1980's has paid massive dividends in recent times. That ground game laid the foundation for what we are seeing today. Bezmenov said the quiet part out loud in 1984 after his defection.
"safety" is a very powerful first order appeal that masks all manner of truly predatory 2nd and 3rd orders. i think masks were incredibly powerful this way.
"your mask protects me" was the most brilliant propaganda of covid. it stole your choice and made it about them. the second order was "no safety added, but a constant sense of crisis and dehumanization" as the pandemic cosplay shouted "this is not normal" every time you went outside and the cognitive dissonance bite of "i would not be doing this unless it were a real crisis" took hold
Another pantomime relict of the pandemic is the propaganda (whoa, that's a lot of P's) of "why must the workers be forced into buildings to make the billionaire real estate owners money?" Because my purple haired friend, in-office work reinforces a community and builds businesses around and in them (security detail, building maintenance, convenience stores, lunch spots, etc.). Remote work breeds disconnection, making hating "the others" easier. The groundwork of this new resurgence of communism really was laid during the Covidian.
Good point!! I hated the Zoom meetings that were forced on us. They made me feel disconnected.
Many people I talked to during that time liked working from home. It helped them escape the accountability of the office.
Some of the best ideas I had with my colleagues happened during impromptu hallway meetings, coffee break get togethers, or brown bag lunch meetings in the break room.
100%. When humans are together it drives innovation. I took a Wharton leadership seminar back in 2017 and one of the greatest things I learned from that was the following:
Instructor wheeled out a cart of Legos. Ask for two volunteers (I was one). Strapped them into heart rate monitors.
1. First exercise: Asked each individual to build a car on their own. Watched heart rates, out of sync, no relation, nothing. Two individuals.
2. Second exercise: Asked both individuals to come to the same side of the cart and build a car together. Within 30 seconds, heart rates sync and beats regulate. Mind blown.
Humans together can achieve more than humans apart. It's literally in our physiology.
Absolutely
Agreed, but we have something they can't overcome, the 2nd amendment. Lots of gun owners who will fight the Left in all of its many forms.
This is why people who aren't convinced that the world is about to burst into flame because of a modest increase in a certain atmospheric trace gas are called "deniers," by climate fanatics. First, it has a religious ring. Second, it links them to Holocaust deniers, who ARE odious. The labeling signals that the targets are deviant, on the level of child rapists, therefore exempt from the usual considerations. You may do what you want with them.