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.
Oh, I'm against these so-called Vaccines all right, but 18 months ago I was for freedom of choice, and my choice was, and still is, to definitely not ever get it.
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:
Speaking as a long-time lefty New Yorker, from my perspective I don't see both sides shifting to extremes to the same extent at all. I've seen my lefty friends go utterly insane and lose all perspective, giving up just about every value I thought I shared with them, and I've watched the Democratic Party turn fascist totalitarian, signaling a terrifying willingness to commit atrocities if they deem it necessary (with the Green Party that I used to belong to shamelessly following suit). On the other hand, I haven't seen any tendency toward extremism among the people on the right I've met. On the contrary, I see a willingness to listen and consider the ideas and positions of us (becoming more and more former) lefties. And I don't see anything among politicians and pundits on the right equivalent to the frightening extremism of the left. Yes, the right is talking even more strongly about Second Amendment rights, but I see as well very strong voices on all levels calling for restraint and peaceful resistance and non-compliance. Is that just a NYC perspective and things are different elsewhere?
Thanks for this, GB. If this is true on the left coast, I can’t see or hear it. I do see and hear far-left shift and virtue signaling. A lot. Even friends who were similar (fiscally right, socially left) are still voting hard-left. Difficult to understand, other than cognitive dissonance and living and working around left-tech.
Here's my point: the median lefty is now roughly twice as far from the mean as the median righty. That's the going "utterly insane" to which you rightly refer. Frankly, there is no point in talking to them anymore.
@Grandma Bear, I’ve witnessed your observations as well, me being old school rust belt lefty with NYC relatives and friends. They’re in lockstep and I can’t believe what I see in them. But from my perspective, they appear to be doubling down.
Have RINOs really moved "left" or are they simply corrupt neocons w/o any principles whatsoever? How would this survey distinguish between America First Republicans and RINOs? At some point you get too tangled up in definitions to make sense of it. Bottom line: the Democrats that existed 30 years ago have gone extinct. The final 50 or so of them (remember the Blue Dog Democrats?) got suckered into voting for Obamacare and were promptly purged. The Dems that rose to replace them were all far left and the trend has only continued.
I personally don't think it's worth the effort to perform a taxonomy analysis on the right. Have McCarthy, McConnell, Graham, Rubio, Thune, et al really moved left or are they just Uniparty corrupticrats? As a great stateswoman once said, "What difference at this point does it make?" They all have to be thrown out.
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.
If you've just sashayed in? Go back and read ... and block out time for both peeing your pants in laughter and backing up to wool-gather and assimilate .
I don't agree 100%?( probably about 95%)...but I view egm as the Thomas Paine combined with John Locke of our times. ( add a dash of George Carlin)
I'll give it a 'breathe the air around Tom Paine', later as i'm peeing my pants over something else at the moment...thanks for that.....the line is from a Bdylan song on the album of John Westley Harding.
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.
What a great comment. Exactomundo for me as well.
🎯
This^^^^
To say nothing of the delicious memes!
Only 15? ;)
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?
I’ve always disliked (actually hated) the “We’re all in this together” slogan.
"we are all in this together" (but not in the same way)
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.
Great post - thanks for the link!
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.
If you’re not against vaccines by now you should be.
Oh, I'm against these so-called Vaccines all right, but 18 months ago I was for freedom of choice, and my choice was, and still is, to definitely not ever get it.
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.
Speaking as a long-time lefty New Yorker, from my perspective I don't see both sides shifting to extremes to the same extent at all. I've seen my lefty friends go utterly insane and lose all perspective, giving up just about every value I thought I shared with them, and I've watched the Democratic Party turn fascist totalitarian, signaling a terrifying willingness to commit atrocities if they deem it necessary (with the Green Party that I used to belong to shamelessly following suit). On the other hand, I haven't seen any tendency toward extremism among the people on the right I've met. On the contrary, I see a willingness to listen and consider the ideas and positions of us (becoming more and more former) lefties. And I don't see anything among politicians and pundits on the right equivalent to the frightening extremism of the left. Yes, the right is talking even more strongly about Second Amendment rights, but I see as well very strong voices on all levels calling for restraint and peaceful resistance and non-compliance. Is that just a NYC perspective and things are different elsewhere?
Thanks for this, GB. If this is true on the left coast, I can’t see or hear it. I do see and hear far-left shift and virtue signaling. A lot. Even friends who were similar (fiscally right, socially left) are still voting hard-left. Difficult to understand, other than cognitive dissonance and living and working around left-tech.
Here's my point: the median lefty is now roughly twice as far from the mean as the median righty. That's the going "utterly insane" to which you rightly refer. Frankly, there is no point in talking to them anymore.
@Grandma Bear, I’ve witnessed your observations as well, me being old school rust belt lefty with NYC relatives and friends. They’re in lockstep and I can’t believe what I see in them. But from my perspective, they appear to be doubling down.
Standing one's ground does not beget extremism. It is refusing others the right to hold their ground that begets extremism.
'[B]oth 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. '
I would posit that both sides have shifted to the left, but the left's shift has been far greater.
Have RINOs really moved "left" or are they simply corrupt neocons w/o any principles whatsoever? How would this survey distinguish between America First Republicans and RINOs? At some point you get too tangled up in definitions to make sense of it. Bottom line: the Democrats that existed 30 years ago have gone extinct. The final 50 or so of them (remember the Blue Dog Democrats?) got suckered into voting for Obamacare and were promptly purged. The Dems that rose to replace them were all far left and the trend has only continued.
I personally don't think it's worth the effort to perform a taxonomy analysis on the right. Have McCarthy, McConnell, Graham, Rubio, Thune, et al really moved left or are they just Uniparty corrupticrats? As a great stateswoman once said, "What difference at this point does it make?" They all have to be thrown out.
Hope Gato gets to your comment.
A lot of the shift you see in those extremist views are fanned by hate and depravity.
There's a lot of hate on the left. Way more than on the right.
Both should be called out by leaders of any group/party, etc.
That is not happening on the left. I believe I can say this objectively as someone who has always been in the "middle".
Hate is a breeding ground for evil.
People are people as he's trying to point out. However not all people are comfortable associating themselves with hate.
I think that distinction is missing from his posting today.
Otherwise I agree with it.
Thanks, had not seen this.
Interesting and scary breakdown between general public and politically engaged, too.
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.
Their tolerance is because they are not cognitive dissidents.
I like that!
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.
Should be required reading.
It's good you posted this
A master class! I am studying for my c.a.t. entrance test with this one.
ooh, there's a fun CAT study guide meme in here somewhere...
thanks.
i just stumbled upon your bad cattitude and will be back for more, fun, sad, exciting, and more read.
If you've just sashayed in? Go back and read ... and block out time for both peeing your pants in laughter and backing up to wool-gather and assimilate .
I don't agree 100%?( probably about 95%)...but I view egm as the Thomas Paine combined with John Locke of our times. ( add a dash of George Carlin)
I'll give it a 'breathe the air around Tom Paine', later as i'm peeing my pants over something else at the moment...thanks for that.....the line is from a Bdylan song on the album of John Westley Harding.
Welcome. Your brain will get a work out here. And lots of laughs. This cat is 💜😻🔥
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.”