EVERY time I think I’m just going to skim a piece you’ve written, (after all, I do have 15 other substacks to read and some antivax tweets to send), you reel me in with so many thought provoking lines.
Stunningly precise indictment of the BS that is inflicted on the people, and which is gobbled up and virtue-signaled by the most cognitively challenged.
PS I still demand to know where is the shouting Greta when you really need her? Why isn’t she chapped and going off about useless masks wrapped around the beaks of birds and sea turtles? And why isn’t she railing on about all the useless trash we’ve created, the stupid “We’re all in this together” signs, the useless PCR tests, the mountains of garbage we’ve generated in this man made, trash-filled “pandemic”? Do you think Pfizer paid off PGreta as well?
And the control tactics of the Very Bad People who are in positions of power are all fundamentally the same psychological technique. No matter whether it is Covid or Climate Change or Racism/White Supremacy or Terrorism - you name it - the Very Bad People are hoping to elicit the same sense of fear a child has to the monster hiding under his bed.
There is always some intangible but omnipotent and ubiquitous evil that needs to be extinguished (i.e. "Covid everywhere! Spray your vegetables with Lysol! Get an unproven garbage pharmaceutical product"). Like a child saying, "Daddy can you make sure there is no monster in the closet," the average person looks to the government for answers and cedes their sovereignty as a result.
Important words are written here... extremely important for your woke friends and family insistent on labelling you an extremist. I truly wasn't against vaccines, but am not vaccinated, and I'm not against electric cars, but mandating both of these things is utterly foolish!! I am labelled a science/climate denier and my accusers are a vacuous lot, indeed.
Yes, both sides have shifted more towards their extreme, but the left's shift to the left has been FAR larger than the right's shift to the right. Pew Research--hardly a hotbed of conservatism--has done serious polling on this phenomenon since the mid-1990s. If data from the last five years were included I suspect that the skew leftward would be of even greater magnitude:
People often have a surprising tolerance for cognitive dissonance, though. This makes sense. Our brains evolved for survival, not for logical consistency or Kantian universalism. People tend to be fine with inconsistency that benefits them or their tribe, and they're extremely good at rationalization.
You don't experience cognitive dissonance when there's little or no cognition in the first place, in other words.
Great analysis, and the analogy to the red-shift phenomenon perfect. The same pattern -- constant reframing of the situation to recalibrate everyone's sense of normal towards an ever-more extreme position, using ideological purity as the sole metric for evaluating moral issues, separating people and inhibiting the formation of natural relationships and loyalties, the deification of leadership who should be trusted more than your five senses or your moral compunctions, etc. -- manifests in literal death cults. Chris Bray ("Tell Me How This Ends") has a great piece analyzing the COVID response through the lens of Jim Jones and People's Temple/Jonestown: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/jim-jones-was-normal?r=sow8t&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
We’re saddled with an American sectarianism that encourages partisans to view one another less as fellow citizens and more as enemies who represent a profound threat to their identities. I believe that it’s because of the sheer number of people who now see the world in this way — an interpretive paradigm in which politics becomes more about identity than disagreement on issues — that the U.S. is so toxically polarized.
This mindset contributes to what political scientists call “negative partisanship”—political division driven by fear and anger directed at the opposing party. In this framework, our two political parties are united more out of sheer hatred of the other team than because of a shared sense of purpose. This largely explains why recent elections have been characterized by unprecedented party loyalty and straight-ticket voting.
Not Goebbels but the american who was an inspiration to him, PR wise. Edward Bernays. Read his books from the 1920s, very enlightening. The man was a brilliant manipulator and propagandist.
I'm about to go to part 2, and am trying to reconcile that my willfulness may actually be :
me being ' light on conviction ', yet willing to change my mind if facts persuade (which I always saw as " not having enough facts to make a credible argument ') ?
And here I've always been told I was" stubborn as a mule, and almost as pretty".
“one side’s radicalization tends to push the other side away from center as well. the fiercer you become about your technocratic privilege, the fiercer i become about my rights.”
EVERY time I think I’m just going to skim a piece you’ve written, (after all, I do have 15 other substacks to read and some antivax tweets to send), you reel me in with so many thought provoking lines.
Stunningly precise indictment of the BS that is inflicted on the people, and which is gobbled up and virtue-signaled by the most cognitively challenged.
PS I still demand to know where is the shouting Greta when you really need her? Why isn’t she chapped and going off about useless masks wrapped around the beaks of birds and sea turtles? And why isn’t she railing on about all the useless trash we’ve created, the stupid “We’re all in this together” signs, the useless PCR tests, the mountains of garbage we’ve generated in this man made, trash-filled “pandemic”? Do you think Pfizer paid off PGreta as well?
Speaking of Greta and asinine and disconnected-from-reality energy policy, I wrote this with her in mind:
https://zhcommenter.substack.com/p/europes-political-energy-policy
And the control tactics of the Very Bad People who are in positions of power are all fundamentally the same psychological technique. No matter whether it is Covid or Climate Change or Racism/White Supremacy or Terrorism - you name it - the Very Bad People are hoping to elicit the same sense of fear a child has to the monster hiding under his bed.
There is always some intangible but omnipotent and ubiquitous evil that needs to be extinguished (i.e. "Covid everywhere! Spray your vegetables with Lysol! Get an unproven garbage pharmaceutical product"). Like a child saying, "Daddy can you make sure there is no monster in the closet," the average person looks to the government for answers and cedes their sovereignty as a result.
Important words are written here... extremely important for your woke friends and family insistent on labelling you an extremist. I truly wasn't against vaccines, but am not vaccinated, and I'm not against electric cars, but mandating both of these things is utterly foolish!! I am labelled a science/climate denier and my accusers are a vacuous lot, indeed.
Yes, both sides have shifted more towards their extreme, but the left's shift to the left has been FAR larger than the right's shift to the right. Pew Research--hardly a hotbed of conservatism--has done serious polling on this phenomenon since the mid-1990s. If data from the last five years were included I suspect that the skew leftward would be of even greater magnitude:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/
[when you go to this page click the PLAY button and check how the median Democrat line has moved compared to the median Republican]
This data directly contravenes the left's BS about how political polarization is the result of a conservative shift to the far right.
People often have a surprising tolerance for cognitive dissonance, though. This makes sense. Our brains evolved for survival, not for logical consistency or Kantian universalism. People tend to be fine with inconsistency that benefits them or their tribe, and they're extremely good at rationalization.
You don't experience cognitive dissonance when there's little or no cognition in the first place, in other words.
Great analysis, and the analogy to the red-shift phenomenon perfect. The same pattern -- constant reframing of the situation to recalibrate everyone's sense of normal towards an ever-more extreme position, using ideological purity as the sole metric for evaluating moral issues, separating people and inhibiting the formation of natural relationships and loyalties, the deification of leadership who should be trusted more than your five senses or your moral compunctions, etc. -- manifests in literal death cults. Chris Bray ("Tell Me How This Ends") has a great piece analyzing the COVID response through the lens of Jim Jones and People's Temple/Jonestown: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/jim-jones-was-normal?r=sow8t&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
We’re saddled with an American sectarianism that encourages partisans to view one another less as fellow citizens and more as enemies who represent a profound threat to their identities. I believe that it’s because of the sheer number of people who now see the world in this way — an interpretive paradigm in which politics becomes more about identity than disagreement on issues — that the U.S. is so toxically polarized.
This mindset contributes to what political scientists call “negative partisanship”—political division driven by fear and anger directed at the opposing party. In this framework, our two political parties are united more out of sheer hatred of the other team than because of a shared sense of purpose. This largely explains why recent elections have been characterized by unprecedented party loyalty and straight-ticket voting.
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/divided-we-stand
Not Goebbels but the american who was an inspiration to him, PR wise. Edward Bernays. Read his books from the 1920s, very enlightening. The man was a brilliant manipulator and propagandist.
A master class! I am studying for my c.a.t. entrance test with this one.
i just stumbled upon your bad cattitude and will be back for more, fun, sad, exciting, and more read.
is it just me or did anyone else notice how asymmetrical Greta's face is? Obvious vax damage
Oof!( or is it Woof?...
I'm about to go to part 2, and am trying to reconcile that my willfulness may actually be :
me being ' light on conviction ', yet willing to change my mind if facts persuade (which I always saw as " not having enough facts to make a credible argument ') ?
And here I've always been told I was" stubborn as a mule, and almost as pretty".
Oof! Gut punch...but let's move fwd...
We need to keep pecking away at the 40% that are persuadable. This is another salvo by Galo and I share his work often.
Humor is a good method too JP is great here (as he always is)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQChw_Rk1Kk&t=401s
Money quote.
“one side’s radicalization tends to push the other side away from center as well. the fiercer you become about your technocratic privilege, the fiercer i become about my rights.”