My only real point of contention here is that I think you lean a little too hard on the both-sidesism of this.
Leftist ideology specifically selects for technocracy; it's part of the liturgy. It has natural inclinations to the form of tyranny you're talking about.
I'm not a "right wing conservative," but most adherents of such a label are less interested in erecting a state to control my every move.
and yet almost no right leaning politicians resisted this either. they all went along, deferred, and even cheer led. they have no plan to dismantle this. what is the gormless opposition party doing to solve this? where is the plan or the action? because outside of Florida I'm just not seeing it.
Exactly what I see in Canada both provincially and federally. There's very few people seeing that it's not left or right that's at fault. It's allowing government way outside the bounds of what they actually are in charge of.
Nailed it! Governments (and other places of power and influence) around the world have been infiltrated/influenced by WEF-indoctrinated Young Global Leaders, Young Global Shapers, etc. - not only are the lot of them delusional megalomaniacs, but appallingly ignorant and utterly lawless.
The lunatics ruining the global asylum are not 'left' or 'right', but 'Opposite Day' verbiage-spouters who cannot be reasoned with because they are 'non-reality-based' - and cannot form any legitimate democratic government while refusing to accept/respect the principles of democracy, human rights, or reality itself.
But if we don't make that clear, in pacifically clearing the perps (and all of their nonsense) out of all public office/public positions, for a return to democratic self-rule within government of/by/for the people, with all equal under the law and no-one permitted any pretence of being 'above the law' and 'legally rogue' in the betrayal and destruction of their fellow-citizens and country in enacting the lunatic global take-over goals of those hostile, predominately-foreign self-interests, how is this horror to be stopped?
Censorship has quelled the voice of conservatives. In many states the one or two big population centers (tech heavy) votes progressive and the rest of the state (rural/blue collar) votes conservative. Our voice goes unheard. Those who receive government handouts are well organized while us plebs who work for our living are hoping as we sign our mail-in ballots that we aren’t being hoodwinked.
"Those who receive government handouts are well organized while us plebs who work for our living are hoping as we sign our mail-in ballots that we aren’t being hoodwinked."
...or that the union members who handle the mail-in ballots from a strongly GOP Zip Code will actually deliver them.
The Opposition party has been under assault since the 2000's. Lois Lerner was weaponised to stop the Tea Party from organising and the entire organisation was audited. FBI agents are stoping any party members that question the official narrative. Ask Jim Jordan and Deven Nunes.
Covid was weaponised to target the right but firing them from jobs for lack of jabs. Small business has been mostly the right as well and they shut down while Walmart stayed open.
Forget the fact that the January 6th committee has clearly shown that anyone associated with the opposition party right now can and will be targeted, and the DOJ will be weaponised against them.
Florida fixed their election system years ago but now any attempt to do that in other states is meet with stiff resistance.
So who and how do you recommend we mount an opposition?
What's going on in Florida? My wife has expressed concern that some version of a Handmaid's Tale awaits us. The metastatic cancer and fractal geometry analogy resonates strong and true. The root problem is the legal system, Citizen's United comes to mind, probably dozens of other cases. Judges don't know Biology. The arteries of our legal system appeared severely sclerotic before the the Great Pandemonium, but now, clotting is everywhere throughout society. Time to Make America Native Again.
And even after decades of witnessing the voices don’t follow through on their words, people still haven’t figured out the system is rigged against the people.
I agree with his wife. Remember that the theocracy is predicated on the lack of ability to conceive and those convicted of behavior crime are sent to a wasteland to harvest or mine something. Hunger Games works too. The Hunger Games author also has a YA series, the Underland Chronicles, in which the underground of NY is ruled over by the Bane (a very Godwin effect dictator rat or rabbit, can't recall lol)
This is the currently almost unique stance of a Ron DeSantis. When everyone was dithering about the great pandemic that was going to kill us all, he is about the only one that actually convened a selection of real experts, heard from all of them, read the literature himself (he is a lawyer, not a scientist, but it is not that hard to understand if you care) and made a competent and cogent decision that was also politically viable.
Other politicians (mostly on principle but less on achieving understanding) made good decisions, but DeSantis' approach and results are unique. The refreshing thing about this all is that people turn out to be not as stupid as we all think -- Florida went from a purple state (actually, slightly blue) to a 20+ point red state. Same voters making a better assessment of who is actually worth electing and what works than any party, anywhere.
DeSantis had to stand up to an endless number of "you're gonna die" and "this will end your political career" and "you'll never get a donation again" people to do what he did -- yet he pulled it off without looking like a buffoon for the sake of so looking. And he has replicated this approach across multiple issues successfully against enormous headwinds that he just ignores and trounces.
Leaders that can do what DeSantis has done don't come up more than once or twice a century as near as I can tell. Let us hope that he can do for the country what he has done for Florida -- there is a reason that Florida is so different from the rest of the US. It is hard to assign so much value to a single person, but many individuals have made similarly large differences when their time had come. Let us hope for once more.
Agree 100%. I listened to his scientific roundtable on Covid that he held early on and was so impressed that he actually had a comprehensive understanding of the studies and data. He asked great questions and allowed the media to question the "experts". When family members were criticizing DeSantis for his "He's going to kill people" policy, I suggested listening to the roundtable. Of course, no takers on that suggestion.
Quite agree. The silence about the J6 rioters being held in indefinite, no bail confinement belies the notion of swift justice. The courts arrive at quite harsh sentences as if all were guilty of violence - group punishment. The dual system of justice is all too apparent. Yet few politicians are willing to step up apparently in fear of being punished for speaking. When we fear our own government we are lost peoples.
Every day the J6 protesters are held makes further mockery of the idea of an equal justice system. And almost nobody in the Republican party makes a wave about it.
You would think this would be a no-brainer. The conservatives should have been showing video 24/7 and doing psa's about January 6th showing what went on as a "mockumentary" of the "insurrection." I would have shown Trump's announcement over and over about "peaceful patriotic protests" and would go off the absurd deep end, saying..."you could see in his eyes what he meant by peaceful."
I watched, on Jan 6, a ton of videos by people and Indie media
of people - typically waved on in by 'gate-keepers' - evidently wanting to peacefully show that the seat of democratic government belongs to The People, as it indeed does.
There were a few goof-balls, as in any crowd, but the only violence I saw were not from them - as in the woman who was shot in the face while she crawled though an unglassed hall-way window.
My housemate was watching other videos, initially on TV (which I don't watch) and for some time thought what she had been shown was all their was and thought I was nuts - because she'd been shown what I suspected were False Flag set-ups, although she eventually came around.
That happened - over days - because I sent her videos that I'd been watching and I couldn't agree more with you that there's nothing like showing what the general public actually did in the US Capitol to make people realise that BS Mountain was blocking the view from them.
and remember, those citizens are held in a local (ie, District of Columbia) jail, not a federal prison. if they were black, merrick garland would have taken over the local jail bec of human rights violations.
💯 agree! I have no cat (see what I did there?) in this hunt. Both sides jumped on the grift with alarming alacrity.
The only things salvageable in Washington DC are the originals of the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. The more I think about that - let’s move them to Florida - seems like the only state that still values them!
Rs were too quiet for a few months before coming to their senses and opening schools, which was the central problem throughout. With schools opened by August, 2020, this would have looked altogether different. Dem teachers' unions made this happen. The govs should have fired all of them.
And while not being in the president’s party may be enough to win midterm elections, it’s certainly not enough to reverse the perilous situation in which small-government libertarians find ourselves. Free speech is under attack from multiple angles, but most dangerously from the unholy alliance between government and media companies — including the social variety. We’re still coming out from year three of unprecedented covid restrictions, despite the complete failure of said restrictions to control the virus. Overwhelmingly these restrictions (and emergency powers) weren’t even properly passed via state legislatures — an attack on our democracy Republic if ever there was one. Government spending is overheating the presses and leading to massive inflation — if not the end to the dollar as the reserve currency of the world — and the only idea the ‘leaders’ have is to print and spend more. Dire straights, indeed.
However, looking up and down the 2024 GOP lineup, the sad truth is that freedom-loving ‘public servants’ are few and far between. Rand Paul took Tony Fauci out to the woodshed a couple times, but Fauci keeps spewing lies on TV and getting paid for it. Ron DeSantis ‘followed the science’ better than nearly all governors, but (to my certainly imperfect knowledge) Kristi Noem was the only governor who (correctly) proclaimed to not have the power to close your business. Ron Johnson has been holding covid hearings and allowing ignored voices to be heard. And…….that’s everybody?
And realistically, even the people I mentioned — the ‘best’ of the GOP — don’t really have a freedom-first mindset. Over time this creates a huge problem, as generally “both sides” agree that government should be DOING MORE. And while this works out great for government officials and their families, regular people are stuck paying the bill for the trillions of dollars rained down on the politically connected — who proclaim the only way to fix this problem is with government DOING MORE…..
Uh.....the free market? Knowing that government is going to continue screwing up healthcare is the first step to fixing it. How about we remove the artificial doctor cap and axe certificate of need laws, considering we're going to need a MASSIVE increase in supply in order to get anything resembling 'universal coverage'?
I was thinking of healthcare when I wrote my response. One of my "conspiracy theories" was that since Obamacare wasn't going to work anyhow, Covid was a great scapegoat as to why it was failing.
I talked to nurses during Covid, and the ones with many years under their belt said that there wasn't much difference between pre Covid, and post Covid years in terms of hospitalizations. What did change was pressure etc. from the media as well as reduction in staff.
Even back when the ACA was passed, some people whispered it was the first step toward 'single payer' because it set the entire industry up for failure. Now add in the covid cash cow and empty hospitals, you have to wonder if the healthcare field is now defacto controlled by government, and what that means for the future.
Even governor Kemp, who was one of the first politicians to re-open, became a disappointment. He would not mandate masks, but he kept extending emergency powers and he went on a tour of Georgia to show correct "mask hygiene." He even had a carrot and a stick argument about masks threatening that there would be "no football" if we didn't tow the line.
You are falling for the ruse. The truth is, with rare exception, they are actually on the same team as the Dems. They use different rhetoric to get elected, yet their actions reveal their true aims.
'and yet almost no right leaning politicians....' But this is back to examining the proclivities of politicians, whereas guttermouth's comment is with regards to the proclivities of those who are not politicians.
I agree with both Gato and Guttermouth. The Left is out to get us. They are Devils. The Right is ineffective. Time to revamp the Right and defeat the Left...
To play bad kitty's advocate against your points of contention, the idea of technocracy was founded (1920s - Rockefeller's Columbia U no less - same as trilaterals 50 years later) with the aim to abolish nation states (laws, justice, equality, liberty) to be replaced by technocrats ("scientific experts") to solve problems and manage society. Leftists want total power to the state to manage society in ever-intrusive ways, not the abolition of it. Conservatives and the right may call for "smaller government" until they have power, and then will also not hesitate to print money like drunken sailors and use the power of the state to undermine individual liberty, when it satisfies certain demos, evangelicals, "moral majority" etc.. and won't hesitate to embrace police-state surveillance and 'precrime'. To revert to Gato's point, the nature of any government is a centralized power to be abused by whomever holds the throne and is (as all humans are) easily corrupted until it reaches a point where it terrorizes its own citizens who still rise every morning to pay it tribute at threat of prison so that it can keep terrorizing them.
That also explains to a degree our societal reaction. Very few people, politicians and people alike, stood up to a lot of this junk. Some actually believe it, and a lot "move along to get along." But now those people indoctrinated are now coming into their own.
Not so. Patriot Act was written by Biden and had full support of the Dems. Both parties are warfare pushers, but the Dems have started the most wars. Both parties are welfare pushers as well.
Well said. Both-sideism is the temptation for the extreme individualist. They're never "far-right", because they see themselves as outside of the political spectrum, on an island of independence. I know this because I find myself doing it. It's individualism in its purest for, staying emotionally arms length from all collectives. But in my observation, collectivism has launched a war against individualism. They're united, feverish and angry. They've abandoned old restraints, particularly to reality itself, and are in "anything goes" mode. For individualists, this is no time for neutrality. They're coming after us and the lifeblood of our ideology.
Exactly. If you ignore scale, one can certainly say both sides are at fault. "Sure. On the left you've got the Gov't, media, big business, entertainment, academia, etc. However, on the right you've got the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, etc. Nothing to see here. Just two sides of the same coin!"
We both know they're not, but that doesn't stop people from projecting that onto them and making it seem like they're of the same spirit, thus not really different from the left.
In present day, you're right: those who like technocratic, futuristic, modernist ideals tend to fascism, corporate capitalism or communism.
With the caveat that the ideologies' principles are secondary to their personal power and wealth; "they" generally divide into those who use the aforementioned schools of thought in an instrumental fashion, those who actually believe those (very few of those) ideolgies as being good, and those who don't understand what ideologies they in reality adheres to or are very close to.
If we'd look at the interwar period in Europe, we'd not see the same thing, but in the US we would as Good Citizen touches upon, and if we'd look at the period 1850-1914 we'd again see different interpretations and iterations of those three "family trees" of ideologies.
For extra fun arguing with your question-statement, add culture/ethnicity to it:
What worked exemplary in all the Nordic nations led to disaster in other places. Why?
Well, yes. And no.* Homogenity (rather than uniformity) helps, but only depending on what mores and codes are present in the culture as such.
For a very easy example, I can compare and contrast swedes on skid row with ukrainian refugees, since I meet both at church every Thursday.
The people coming for help line up outside in the morning while we are buzzing about indoors, packing the goods - since it's food we do it as close to hand-out time as possible.
The swedes, from handicapped and seniors to druggies and alkys (and yes, there's overlap) line up neatly. First come, first served. The ukrainians (and arabs, afghans, africans, gypises when such are present) send one person there early.
Then, when the rest arrive, they try to walk past the line to their kinsman in front.
That's a no-no here, and we've come a hairsbreadth away from fisticuffs between various tribes. So, when told off by one of the ushers (two men, one of them a former jaeger korps member, since the arabs and afghans show zero respect for "infidel" women, sadly) they first remonstrate, then try wheedling, and then falls into line at the back.
For us swedes, forming a orderly line comes natural. For a great many people, loudest, brashest, most threatening or menacing and with the highest hierarchical position comes first.
Thus, you can have a highly culturally/ethnically homogenous nation (Palestine f.e.) and still fail at everything, and you can also have a more mixed nation (Israel) and succeed due to internal apartheid and the norms and codes of the dominant culture.
The key is, I think, that the ideology chosen gels with the cultural norms already present - so for the US, seeing as english, dutch, german and french traders and merchants and craftsmen are very much your original cultural heritage (polacks, swedes, italians and so on being later arrivals), one should look at those nations and peoples for clues as to what works well and what does not.
Of course, I'm basing the above ideas about the US on my "American Cultural Studies"-course from decades ago, so I could be way off base here.
The basic ethos of America is "you can't fucking tell me what to do" and those not transported here as indentured servants etc. etc. were all running away from whatever norms their (often quite local) community was trying to force on them. Every little mad cult in Europe thought it worth risking dying on the sea journey to bending the neck to whatever doctrine was being forced on them, and then once they got here, they kept fragmenting further.
It was only in the cities where everyone was forced to mix with those they naturally despised that a new society grew, but of course it was dependent on industry as opposite to rural closed cultural islets.
We really aren't like anyone else and our undoing was that admiration for the social welfare states in postwar northern Europe. We ain't got the homogeneity necessary for that to succeed.
Very possible, as to the last paragraph. Our welfare state worked like clockwork (including grinding down those deemed unfit, sadly and wholly unnecessary too) up until the early 1990s.
Main reason people left Sweden wasn't so much religion as it was old outdated laws re: trade and business, stifling enterprise and innovation. Our religious nutjobs, like herrnhutismen (Moravian Church) generally moved far out into the wilderness instead and was often left alone unless they made too much noise.
Not too far off from where I'm sitting, there was a local cult up until mid-1900s which combined christianity with blood mysticism and ritual sex. They were in equal amounts feared, respected for the audacity of their weirdness, and shunned for being heretical.
Still, perhaps the influx of South and Central Americans with their cultures' greater focus on family and kin will be the building stone to an american Renaissance? Family is the foundation of every soceity, culture and civilisation, yes?
Well, Central and South America encompass quite a lot of different local cultures and norms.
California and the Southwest states along the border were built on a strong traditional Spanish/European Mexican culture.
Many of the migrants coming in today from Central America speak Spanish as at least their second language and perhaps even their third, depending on their community. They have zero in common, really, with Mexicans from non-indigenous backgrounds, or with Colombians, or Venezuelans, or Brazilians, all of whom are distinctive from one another.
It always surprised me in Pakistan that so many largely uneducated people coming from the agricultural and laboring classes nevertheless could quote poetry and classical aphorisms etc. etc. and there was a very strong hunger for education even if there wasn't a realistic hope in hell of that improving the long-term prospects of any particular individual kid from that background, because of all the social barriers to advancement/corruption in HS and university admissions etc. There was no shortage of idiots but there was at least a powerful cultural preference for education.
The attitudes of people who will stay in migrant agricultural work and make their kids work with them, too, for the short-term benefit of the family but to the great detriment of the future of the kids are different. A certain absence of forward thinking. And accessing free benefits of a welfare state doesn't fix that.
Actually, you can add Swedes back into our original cultural heritage. One of our oldest colonies, on the lower Delaware River, was New Sweden, founded during the Thirty Years War in the 1600s. It was a little too small, and soon got taken over by Dutch New Amsterdam, which in turn was taken over by the British and renamed 'New York'.
Of course, the great Nordic migration to the US was in the late 1800s, but there has been a Swedish presence here going back almost as far as the English, Dutch, and French.
What are they actively doing to stop it? For the most part, I don't see any indication. The only difference I see is that government under conservatives, might be expanding at a slower rate. That's like a fat guy only gaining a half pound a day instead of a pound a day. "Reduction in increase" should not be the goal, but rather "an increase in the reduction" of government.
Understanding that convid was simply a training exercise for the "global warming" tyranny to come is the most important message we need to get out to normies....
Except that the same sheeple who bought in on “Covid” will be the same who believe in “climate change” & that draconian measures MUST be done, even to global detriment, damage & death
There are some miraculous substances which, if used sensibly, can truly expand vision, understanding and focus (this last may be a paradox with “expand”.
"they're more efficient in getting to the murdery part quickly."
Are they? My guess is that C0VID was supposed to kill a lot more people, and the poison death jabs were going to finish off the rest. That hasn't happened, even though many have had four or five shots total.
Ronald Reagan nailed it when he noted that "The nine most frightening words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'. Government has convinced itself, and a lot of us, that its purpose is to solve "problems". The problem with that is often the "problem" was created by government in the first place. German sociologist, Max Weber, decades ago, defined what a bureaucracy is and what it does. And what it does it increase in size to the point that self-perpetuation is its primary, and perhaps only, purpose. The Great Society, devised by Lyndon Johnson and the Democrap party, minus the inconvenient John F Kennedy, is a perfect example of this. 95% of the "problems" it was created to fix still exist, 60 years later, but the bureaus and agencies created to do the job have increased exponentially in size, authority, and budget. Bureaucracy and its concomitant bureaucrap are a genuinely dangerous problem to which there are solutions, but none of which are easy or pleasant.
Absolutely! This is why in centuries past the church and nobility wanted to keep the masses illiterate....they alone wanted to be the ones to define and tell the people what was what. In this way, they could control the plebes more easily.
"the greatest enemy of we the people is not left or right. it’s bureaucracy and technocracy." Right, but how do we make them go away? What actual steps can Team Reality follow to (for example) shut down NIH?
Rather then tearing down dysfunctional systems, setting up alternatives in the form of small, decentralized communities of a parallel economy. Easier said than done. Community activist groups, small educational co-ops, neighborhood watch groups ... possible ways to start. I am finishing my career as an educator, supplementing my meager pension by doing contract work for largely dysfunctional public schools in West Tokyo.
On the other hand, I am a member of a couple of loosely organized local groups ... one is a roving soup kitchen supporting the homeless around Shinjuku station, another is a drinking/camping group that consciously tries to include those with medical handicaps.
Will be drinking (and parsing the Japanese take on the plandemic) next week after school, and take a walk about with the soup group the week after. The members of these groups are members of other similar groups, making a loose network (cells?) of human relationships independent of their institutional workplace or government bureaucracy. Even though I am not Japanese, I feel the empathy-driven connections, and mutual support.
It would not take much for a parallel 'system' of barter-trade of skills, services, and goods to naturally emerge as things become tough. Some such mutual help along practical lines has already emerged ... just not enough to ween us from wage-slave dependence.
I just subscribed. Thank you for putting your ideas out there. I agree with the others who commented "vote" and "build parallel systems," and I do those things (meet the mom who organized the weekly 5k competition for kids who were deprived of school sports in 2020), but the last politician I remember talking about shutting down NIH was Ron Paul (not Rand, but Ron), and parallel systems are nice, but the official system is the one that already takes an ever-larger share of our dollars every year. All politicians (with the rare exception of the third-party guy who gets trounced) are two heads of a one-party system that serves only itself. I can vote for the Republican who promises smaller government, but he means "less monstrous increases in staffing and funding," not "Dept of Education ends next week."
Thank you for the link... although I'll respectfully say two things from my first quick glance at it: Showing up at school board meetings with data doesn't get mask mandates repealed; sending your kids to school without masks, knowing they'll be sent home for a week before the school board caves, does. This is literally true (see Volusia County, FL, last September, and compare it with every other county, where parents complained at meetings, with data and studies, but went ahead and dutifully put masks on Jill and Johnny so their perfect attendance didn't get f'd up). The other is, Can we please not use the nasty metaverse term "meatspace" for real life? It makes me want to cry and vomit at the same time. The world (the actual world: trees, humans, animals, beaches, sky) is beautiful and primal and real. It is not "meat," and using that reductivist term is a major turnoff. Neal Stephenson would not be on our side here. Let's not use his vocab. Please.
Vote and constantly make your voice heard to those you voted for, especially in the House where they have the power of the purse and can remove funding from these people. If they don’t deliver, vote differently next time and continue to put pressure on them. Also, participate in local politics. Put pressure on your AG to file suits against the bureaucracy and challenge their rule in the courts. Other than that, I have no clue! But, El Gato is 100% right here.
No time to participate in local politics...so many comments to read through here. And I'm a slow reader. Agree at the Local level. Will not consent to State and Federal. My mental microbiome requires a fair amount of sarcasm to maintain peak performance.
Then at very least, start by searching out info on school, municipal, and county candidates, well in advance of elections.
You don't even need to run for office, or donate. You at very least need to start being informed before casting a ballot. If you don't know a candidate's positions, don't just automatically vote for them.
Thank you for this. It’s comforting in a weird way to know that other people are formulating almost your exact thoughts- even if they are terrifying. I’m a lay person who knows a little “science” (that’s like a dirty word these days) and from the get go I knew something was very off intuitively- I had nothing to back it up except gut feeling. I started gravitating toward alternative sources of info and found you and others and honestly my criteria for trust was just a “knowing”. People are so removed from nature and their own rhythms that they can’t see evil right in front of them. I often wonder which politicians are just useful idiots too. I’m very naive though, I’ve learned over the past few years. I used to trust everyone and it’s hard to accept that people could not be human
I blame the Fourth Estate more than any other institution. We need an institution full of skeptical SOBs who challenge all the bogus and dubious narratives and aren't afraid to challenge the pronouncements of the "experts" and "authorities."
If the free press did its most important job, false narratives would not have become "settled science." "Conventional wisdom" wouldn't be settled either. The politicians are awful and part of the problem, but even they would hold hearings and seek the truth if the press had alerted the public that X truth was probably BS. The politicians would then grandstand to expose the liars and frauds - if for no other reason than to make themselves look good.
Some will say the "watchdog" press has always been captured, but I don't think the press was as 100-percent captured in the past as it is today.
Basically, if there is no influential "watchdog" press, the Powers that Be know they will not be held accountable for anything ... and so they act accordingly.
I have said for years that the true cancer in America is the alphabet legacy media. And it's gotten worse, far worse, year by year.
If the media just reported news straight-up, didn't fabricate or suppress, IMO the Democrat Party as constituted over the past 2 decades would be at most a fringe player in American politics. It's the media that ought to be the first, and probably only necessary, front when the next American Revolution or civil war erupts.
Building on my comments below that it's the Fourth Estate that has really sunk society, here's a piece I wrote at my Substack. It's a follow-up article to a simple feature story I wrote about a Minnesota man who died after getting his Pfizer jab. As I point out, there are probably 40,000 mainstream journalists who could have quickly done the same article I did ... But not one has done this. I'm not aware of any mainstream newspaper or magazine that's done ONE major story on a person who died from vaccine injuries. This fraction - 0-out-of-40,000 - shows us how "captured" the mainstream press has become. It shows us that the groupthink in these newsrooms must be 100 percent.
This is the real "bleak" story - the important stories can't even be written; the major scandals won't ever be exposed.
A short story: I don't watch the MSM at all. My liberal SIL does. I knew about those donating to the Canadian truckers having their bank accounts suspended. She had no idea.
If CNN/MSNBC doesn't cover it, it doesn't happen in their world.
We have lots and lots of such people over here: state media doesn't talk about it? Hasn't happened or isn't true. State media say it's bad? It's bad. Tomorrow it might be good, but today it is bad.
It just goes to show, there's no functional difference between a lie we choose to believe and a truth we choose to reject.
Years ago, when Stephen Colbert's right-wing character turned "I don't see race" into a punchline, I knew exactly where that was headed. Because I read history. But a huge number of people just go along with any idea, no matter how idiotic, as long as it comes from some perceived authority figure (in this case, a snarky left-wing comedian with a bookish image).
I spent years arguing with NPCs trying to explain why abandoning the notion that people should be treated as individuals is a bad idea. I got nowhere. Most people simply will not listen to any idea that deviates from what an authority figure tells them until blood is running in the streets. It's sad, but it's true. It's just a matter of how deep the abyss we fall into winds up being. So buckle up, look out for number 1, and damn the rest. There's no way to save them.
All they do is identify the "politically correct" position and then take that position. When most everyone has the same view, there is no risk you will be criticized for holding the same position.
If you want to move up the organizational pyramid at your agency or company, don't take any contrarian or dissident positions. If all the key decisions are wrong (and harmful), this doesn't matter. You are still safe. This does matter, however, to the rest of us.
The wrong decision or position almost always prevails. Not only that, these people now work overtime to cancel, smear and attack anyone who challenges the "authorized" narrative.
Exactly. What I realized in most organizations is that failure or success matter far less than one would imagine vs. whether you are inline with conventional wisdom. It's one of the reasons why so many organizations make catastrophic mistakes.
most politicians are also terrible at getting elected. They just have a good team around them. They also have people with influence who have dirt on them and so let them get into power so they can be used.
Because of how and for how long this has metastasized, I don't think it can be torn down brick-by-brick and rebuilt.
As with a snake, we will have to cut off its head, and only then can it be rebuilt brick-by-brick.
As the ol' maxim goes, "you can vote your way into tyranny...". Until enough people pay dearly for what they've done and what they continue to do, until enough "disincentives" are brought to bear upon them, they will continue unabated. In *every* realm, not just politics.
Look at the recent revelations about what goes on at The Francis Parker School in Chicago. And Balenciaga. And the American Academy of Pediatrics. And too many children's hospitals in America.
And what's happening in New Zealand. And in Australia. The list is seemingly endless.
Until enough, shall we say, disincentives, are brought to bear upon the perps who are doing this sh*t, they will not stop. They. Will. Not. Stop.
To your point about The Experts getting it wrong - I think a major problem is they hold the a priori assumption that the official data they're working off is true and reliable.
Our excess deaths in Australia are at 17% and The Experts think vax injuries have nothing to do with it, because so few injuries and deaths are 'officially recorded'. I'd wager that it has never occurred to any of them that perhaps the data is not a true reflection of the state of things.
This is absolutely true. The number of times I have been at conferences and heard someone respond to the question “Hoe reliable is the data?” with “well it isn’t very good but it’s the best we have” followed by a paper assuming the data is God’s own Truth is maddening.
I keep going back to the thought that Bankster-Fraud was able to pull it off for so long because, connections and connivances aside, the egos of the people he was pitching would not allow them to admit, maybe even to themselves, that they had no idea what he was talking about but that it "sounded smart" and was out of their wheelhouses, so leave it to the boy geniuses.
Someone tried to pitch me on a pyramid scheme called Hyperfund last year, and I watched several friends make money on it, but I sensed that someone would end up holding the bag. It was clear that the marketing pitch was to female solopreneurs in small or spiritual-work sectors who would be impressed by the supposed smarts and credentials and noble, world-saving vision of a Chinese crypto-bro who quoted Mises, who wanted to enfranchise them to this exciting new world.
I just learned what a "pig-fattening" scam looks like, and how the scammers use the media hype on, and ignorance of, the crypto space to suck people into believing that outlandish returns are possible forever.
And this is what is happening to "our" elected officials. They are being pig-fattened by scammers and their egos lap it up. You cannot cheat an honest man, and Diogenes would burn through a lot of oil before he gave up and died of despair in the halls of elected power.
My only real point of contention here is that I think you lean a little too hard on the both-sidesism of this.
Leftist ideology specifically selects for technocracy; it's part of the liturgy. It has natural inclinations to the form of tyranny you're talking about.
I'm not a "right wing conservative," but most adherents of such a label are less interested in erecting a state to control my every move.
I do feel this is a meaningful difference.
and yet almost no right leaning politicians resisted this either. they all went along, deferred, and even cheer led. they have no plan to dismantle this. what is the gormless opposition party doing to solve this? where is the plan or the action? because outside of Florida I'm just not seeing it.
Exactly what I see in Canada both provincially and federally. There's very few people seeing that it's not left or right that's at fault. It's allowing government way outside the bounds of what they actually are in charge of.
Nailed it! Governments (and other places of power and influence) around the world have been infiltrated/influenced by WEF-indoctrinated Young Global Leaders, Young Global Shapers, etc. - not only are the lot of them delusional megalomaniacs, but appallingly ignorant and utterly lawless.
The lunatics ruining the global asylum are not 'left' or 'right', but 'Opposite Day' verbiage-spouters who cannot be reasoned with because they are 'non-reality-based' - and cannot form any legitimate democratic government while refusing to accept/respect the principles of democracy, human rights, or reality itself.
But if we don't make that clear, in pacifically clearing the perps (and all of their nonsense) out of all public office/public positions, for a return to democratic self-rule within government of/by/for the people, with all equal under the law and no-one permitted any pretence of being 'above the law' and 'legally rogue' in the betrayal and destruction of their fellow-citizens and country in enacting the lunatic global take-over goals of those hostile, predominately-foreign self-interests, how is this horror to be stopped?
Censorship has quelled the voice of conservatives. In many states the one or two big population centers (tech heavy) votes progressive and the rest of the state (rural/blue collar) votes conservative. Our voice goes unheard. Those who receive government handouts are well organized while us plebs who work for our living are hoping as we sign our mail-in ballots that we aren’t being hoodwinked.
"Those who receive government handouts are well organized while us plebs who work for our living are hoping as we sign our mail-in ballots that we aren’t being hoodwinked."
...or that the union members who handle the mail-in ballots from a strongly GOP Zip Code will actually deliver them.
...which is why if you're going to use the absentee/mail-in ballot, you deliver it to the polling place yourself.
And they orchestrated that perfectly right!!
The Opposition party has been under assault since the 2000's. Lois Lerner was weaponised to stop the Tea Party from organising and the entire organisation was audited. FBI agents are stoping any party members that question the official narrative. Ask Jim Jordan and Deven Nunes.
Covid was weaponised to target the right but firing them from jobs for lack of jabs. Small business has been mostly the right as well and they shut down while Walmart stayed open.
Forget the fact that the January 6th committee has clearly shown that anyone associated with the opposition party right now can and will be targeted, and the DOJ will be weaponised against them.
Florida fixed their election system years ago but now any attempt to do that in other states is meet with stiff resistance.
So who and how do you recommend we mount an opposition?
What's going on in Florida? My wife has expressed concern that some version of a Handmaid's Tale awaits us. The metastatic cancer and fractal geometry analogy resonates strong and true. The root problem is the legal system, Citizen's United comes to mind, probably dozens of other cases. Judges don't know Biology. The arteries of our legal system appeared severely sclerotic before the the Great Pandemonium, but now, clotting is everywhere throughout society. Time to Make America Native Again.
agree.
The legal system.
Also remember both "sides" are beholden to their "sponsors" boot on their neck.
Politics is a game being played and it does not involve any of us 'little people"
Both "sides" have INVITED the boot on their neck by taking campaign $$$$
They are complicit in this.
Citizens giving money to candidates is an exercise of free speech. They are financing a voice they find supporting their own.
Oh right. Money is speech here in the U.S. The more you have, the more you’re heard.
Voting is not enough. It’s “Buy Now.”
And even after decades of witnessing the voices don’t follow through on their words, people still haven’t figured out the system is rigged against the people.
It totally involves us:
we're the ball.
yes, that is all.
We get kicked
"My wife has expressed concern that some version of a Handmaid's Tale awaits us."
Your wife is using an incorrect story analogy.
The Hunger Games is the correct one.
I agree with his wife. Remember that the theocracy is predicated on the lack of ability to conceive and those convicted of behavior crime are sent to a wasteland to harvest or mine something. Hunger Games works too. The Hunger Games author also has a YA series, the Underland Chronicles, in which the underground of NY is ruled over by the Bane (a very Godwin effect dictator rat or rabbit, can't recall lol)
I love that: The Great Pandemonium. ....stealing!
Theft only occurs when people fail to pay attention to the things they value. My eyes never are diverted from my family.
And yet, the State can take custody of your children. Legalized theft.
"New Zealand court takes custody of Baby Will." https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-zealand-court-takes-custody-of
This is the currently almost unique stance of a Ron DeSantis. When everyone was dithering about the great pandemic that was going to kill us all, he is about the only one that actually convened a selection of real experts, heard from all of them, read the literature himself (he is a lawyer, not a scientist, but it is not that hard to understand if you care) and made a competent and cogent decision that was also politically viable.
Other politicians (mostly on principle but less on achieving understanding) made good decisions, but DeSantis' approach and results are unique. The refreshing thing about this all is that people turn out to be not as stupid as we all think -- Florida went from a purple state (actually, slightly blue) to a 20+ point red state. Same voters making a better assessment of who is actually worth electing and what works than any party, anywhere.
DeSantis had to stand up to an endless number of "you're gonna die" and "this will end your political career" and "you'll never get a donation again" people to do what he did -- yet he pulled it off without looking like a buffoon for the sake of so looking. And he has replicated this approach across multiple issues successfully against enormous headwinds that he just ignores and trounces.
Leaders that can do what DeSantis has done don't come up more than once or twice a century as near as I can tell. Let us hope that he can do for the country what he has done for Florida -- there is a reason that Florida is so different from the rest of the US. It is hard to assign so much value to a single person, but many individuals have made similarly large differences when their time had come. Let us hope for once more.
Agree 100%. I listened to his scientific roundtable on Covid that he held early on and was so impressed that he actually had a comprehensive understanding of the studies and data. He asked great questions and allowed the media to question the "experts". When family members were criticizing DeSantis for his "He's going to kill people" policy, I suggested listening to the roundtable. Of course, no takers on that suggestion.
Family members have really become depressing, haven't they? Perhaps they are all related to the postman instead...
just like Mike Pence, chair of DJT's covid task force, did. /s
Quite agree. The silence about the J6 rioters being held in indefinite, no bail confinement belies the notion of swift justice. The courts arrive at quite harsh sentences as if all were guilty of violence - group punishment. The dual system of justice is all too apparent. Yet few politicians are willing to step up apparently in fear of being punished for speaking. When we fear our own government we are lost peoples.
Every day the J6 protesters are held makes further mockery of the idea of an equal justice system. And almost nobody in the Republican party makes a wave about it.
You would think this would be a no-brainer. The conservatives should have been showing video 24/7 and doing psa's about January 6th showing what went on as a "mockumentary" of the "insurrection." I would have shown Trump's announcement over and over about "peaceful patriotic protests" and would go off the absurd deep end, saying..."you could see in his eyes what he meant by peaceful."
I watched, on Jan 6, a ton of videos by people and Indie media
of people - typically waved on in by 'gate-keepers' - evidently wanting to peacefully show that the seat of democratic government belongs to The People, as it indeed does.
There were a few goof-balls, as in any crowd, but the only violence I saw were not from them - as in the woman who was shot in the face while she crawled though an unglassed hall-way window.
My housemate was watching other videos, initially on TV (which I don't watch) and for some time thought what she had been shown was all their was and thought I was nuts - because she'd been shown what I suspected were False Flag set-ups, although she eventually came around.
That happened - over days - because I sent her videos that I'd been watching and I couldn't agree more with you that there's nothing like showing what the general public actually did in the US Capitol to make people realise that BS Mountain was blocking the view from them.
and remember, those citizens are held in a local (ie, District of Columbia) jail, not a federal prison. if they were black, merrick garland would have taken over the local jail bec of human rights violations.
💯 agree! I have no cat (see what I did there?) in this hunt. Both sides jumped on the grift with alarming alacrity.
The only things salvageable in Washington DC are the originals of the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. The more I think about that - let’s move them to Florida - seems like the only state that still values them!
+points for "alarming alacrity".
Which shows you they were not on the right. Don’t confuse party label with political philosophy.
I think we're conflating politicians in political parties with ideological polarities here.
Rs were too quiet for a few months before coming to their senses and opening schools, which was the central problem throughout. With schools opened by August, 2020, this would have looked altogether different. Dem teachers' unions made this happen. The govs should have fired all of them.
https://markoshinskie8de.substack.com/p/garage-rockers-and-covid-censorship
The closed schools freed up the teachers for BLM rioting.
That's why the GOP is the Washington Generals of the Uniparty.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/democrats-have-gone-crazy-but-freedom
And while not being in the president’s party may be enough to win midterm elections, it’s certainly not enough to reverse the perilous situation in which small-government libertarians find ourselves. Free speech is under attack from multiple angles, but most dangerously from the unholy alliance between government and media companies — including the social variety. We’re still coming out from year three of unprecedented covid restrictions, despite the complete failure of said restrictions to control the virus. Overwhelmingly these restrictions (and emergency powers) weren’t even properly passed via state legislatures — an attack on our democracy Republic if ever there was one. Government spending is overheating the presses and leading to massive inflation — if not the end to the dollar as the reserve currency of the world — and the only idea the ‘leaders’ have is to print and spend more. Dire straights, indeed.
However, looking up and down the 2024 GOP lineup, the sad truth is that freedom-loving ‘public servants’ are few and far between. Rand Paul took Tony Fauci out to the woodshed a couple times, but Fauci keeps spewing lies on TV and getting paid for it. Ron DeSantis ‘followed the science’ better than nearly all governors, but (to my certainly imperfect knowledge) Kristi Noem was the only governor who (correctly) proclaimed to not have the power to close your business. Ron Johnson has been holding covid hearings and allowing ignored voices to be heard. And…….that’s everybody?
And realistically, even the people I mentioned — the ‘best’ of the GOP — don’t really have a freedom-first mindset. Over time this creates a huge problem, as generally “both sides” agree that government should be DOING MORE. And while this works out great for government officials and their families, regular people are stuck paying the bill for the trillions of dollars rained down on the politically connected — who proclaim the only way to fix this problem is with government DOING MORE…..
Yep, the mindset is they see government as the answer to whatever problem there is, when it should be the last resort.
"What are you going to replace Obamacare with?"
Uh.....the free market? Knowing that government is going to continue screwing up healthcare is the first step to fixing it. How about we remove the artificial doctor cap and axe certificate of need laws, considering we're going to need a MASSIVE increase in supply in order to get anything resembling 'universal coverage'?
I was thinking of healthcare when I wrote my response. One of my "conspiracy theories" was that since Obamacare wasn't going to work anyhow, Covid was a great scapegoat as to why it was failing.
I talked to nurses during Covid, and the ones with many years under their belt said that there wasn't much difference between pre Covid, and post Covid years in terms of hospitalizations. What did change was pressure etc. from the media as well as reduction in staff.
Even back when the ACA was passed, some people whispered it was the first step toward 'single payer' because it set the entire industry up for failure. Now add in the covid cash cow and empty hospitals, you have to wonder if the healthcare field is now defacto controlled by government, and what that means for the future.
Even governor Kemp, who was one of the first politicians to re-open, became a disappointment. He would not mandate masks, but he kept extending emergency powers and he went on a tour of Georgia to show correct "mask hygiene." He even had a carrot and a stick argument about masks threatening that there would be "no football" if we didn't tow the line.
We don't see it here in New Zealand, either. The "opposition" party is not opposing any of the newly-installed tyranny.
Sorry to say it, but Republicans appear to be feckless, scared little pussies. They're too concerned about being liked. Sigh.
Scare the little pussies enough and they rip your face off. Don’t be badmouthing 🐱
You are falling for the ruse. The truth is, with rare exception, they are actually on the same team as the Dems. They use different rhetoric to get elected, yet their actions reveal their true aims.
'and yet almost no right leaning politicians....' But this is back to examining the proclivities of politicians, whereas guttermouth's comment is with regards to the proclivities of those who are not politicians.
I agree with both Gato and Guttermouth. The Left is out to get us. They are Devils. The Right is ineffective. Time to revamp the Right and defeat the Left...
To play bad kitty's advocate against your points of contention, the idea of technocracy was founded (1920s - Rockefeller's Columbia U no less - same as trilaterals 50 years later) with the aim to abolish nation states (laws, justice, equality, liberty) to be replaced by technocrats ("scientific experts") to solve problems and manage society. Leftists want total power to the state to manage society in ever-intrusive ways, not the abolition of it. Conservatives and the right may call for "smaller government" until they have power, and then will also not hesitate to print money like drunken sailors and use the power of the state to undermine individual liberty, when it satisfies certain demos, evangelicals, "moral majority" etc.. and won't hesitate to embrace police-state surveillance and 'precrime'. To revert to Gato's point, the nature of any government is a centralized power to be abused by whomever holds the throne and is (as all humans are) easily corrupted until it reaches a point where it terrorizes its own citizens who still rise every morning to pay it tribute at threat of prison so that it can keep terrorizing them.
It wasn’t framed that way. It was framed to be balanced and equitable. Human nature, greed and lust for power supplanted an inspired design.
Bernard Goldberg wrote a book a while ago: Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: : How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve
I think the title sums up our situation pretty well.
That also explains to a degree our societal reaction. Very few people, politicians and people alike, stood up to a lot of this junk. Some actually believe it, and a lot "move along to get along." But now those people indoctrinated are now coming into their own.
I seem to remember the 'War on Terror' installation of the mass surveillance state was instituted by the f'ing Republicans.
R push Warfare state.
L push Welfare state.
Neither pushback.
As Ron Paul said, the left wants welfare, the right wants warfare, so they compromise and do both.
However, these days the neocons are firmly on the left.
Not so. Patriot Act was written by Biden and had full support of the Dems. Both parties are warfare pushers, but the Dems have started the most wars. Both parties are welfare pushers as well.
Well said. Both-sideism is the temptation for the extreme individualist. They're never "far-right", because they see themselves as outside of the political spectrum, on an island of independence. I know this because I find myself doing it. It's individualism in its purest for, staying emotionally arms length from all collectives. But in my observation, collectivism has launched a war against individualism. They're united, feverish and angry. They've abandoned old restraints, particularly to reality itself, and are in "anything goes" mode. For individualists, this is no time for neutrality. They're coming after us and the lifeblood of our ideology.
Yep. Collectivism vs. individualism.
What scares me is that the government, the military, the media and corp USSA are all on the part of the collectivists.
Because the technocrats are. It is so much easier to rule a collective.
Exactly. If you ignore scale, one can certainly say both sides are at fault. "Sure. On the left you've got the Gov't, media, big business, entertainment, academia, etc. However, on the right you've got the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, etc. Nothing to see here. Just two sides of the same coin!"
How areOath Keepers or Proud Boys coming for your freedom?
We both know they're not, but that doesn't stop people from projecting that onto them and making it seem like they're of the same spirit, thus not really different from the left.
In present day, you're right: those who like technocratic, futuristic, modernist ideals tend to fascism, corporate capitalism or communism.
With the caveat that the ideologies' principles are secondary to their personal power and wealth; "they" generally divide into those who use the aforementioned schools of thought in an instrumental fashion, those who actually believe those (very few of those) ideolgies as being good, and those who don't understand what ideologies they in reality adheres to or are very close to.
If we'd look at the interwar period in Europe, we'd not see the same thing, but in the US we would as Good Citizen touches upon, and if we'd look at the period 1850-1914 we'd again see different interpretations and iterations of those three "family trees" of ideologies.
For extra fun arguing with your question-statement, add culture/ethnicity to it:
What worked exemplary in all the Nordic nations led to disaster in other places. Why?
Relative cultural/ethnic uniformity?
It works pretty well in Japan for similar reasons.
Well, yes. And no.* Homogenity (rather than uniformity) helps, but only depending on what mores and codes are present in the culture as such.
For a very easy example, I can compare and contrast swedes on skid row with ukrainian refugees, since I meet both at church every Thursday.
The people coming for help line up outside in the morning while we are buzzing about indoors, packing the goods - since it's food we do it as close to hand-out time as possible.
The swedes, from handicapped and seniors to druggies and alkys (and yes, there's overlap) line up neatly. First come, first served. The ukrainians (and arabs, afghans, africans, gypises when such are present) send one person there early.
Then, when the rest arrive, they try to walk past the line to their kinsman in front.
That's a no-no here, and we've come a hairsbreadth away from fisticuffs between various tribes. So, when told off by one of the ushers (two men, one of them a former jaeger korps member, since the arabs and afghans show zero respect for "infidel" women, sadly) they first remonstrate, then try wheedling, and then falls into line at the back.
For us swedes, forming a orderly line comes natural. For a great many people, loudest, brashest, most threatening or menacing and with the highest hierarchical position comes first.
Thus, you can have a highly culturally/ethnically homogenous nation (Palestine f.e.) and still fail at everything, and you can also have a more mixed nation (Israel) and succeed due to internal apartheid and the norms and codes of the dominant culture.
The key is, I think, that the ideology chosen gels with the cultural norms already present - so for the US, seeing as english, dutch, german and french traders and merchants and craftsmen are very much your original cultural heritage (polacks, swedes, italians and so on being later arrivals), one should look at those nations and peoples for clues as to what works well and what does not.
Of course, I'm basing the above ideas about the US on my "American Cultural Studies"-course from decades ago, so I could be way off base here.
*How's that for pedantry? :))
The basic ethos of America is "you can't fucking tell me what to do" and those not transported here as indentured servants etc. etc. were all running away from whatever norms their (often quite local) community was trying to force on them. Every little mad cult in Europe thought it worth risking dying on the sea journey to bending the neck to whatever doctrine was being forced on them, and then once they got here, they kept fragmenting further.
It was only in the cities where everyone was forced to mix with those they naturally despised that a new society grew, but of course it was dependent on industry as opposite to rural closed cultural islets.
We really aren't like anyone else and our undoing was that admiration for the social welfare states in postwar northern Europe. We ain't got the homogeneity necessary for that to succeed.
Very possible, as to the last paragraph. Our welfare state worked like clockwork (including grinding down those deemed unfit, sadly and wholly unnecessary too) up until the early 1990s.
Main reason people left Sweden wasn't so much religion as it was old outdated laws re: trade and business, stifling enterprise and innovation. Our religious nutjobs, like herrnhutismen (Moravian Church) generally moved far out into the wilderness instead and was often left alone unless they made too much noise.
Not too far off from where I'm sitting, there was a local cult up until mid-1900s which combined christianity with blood mysticism and ritual sex. They were in equal amounts feared, respected for the audacity of their weirdness, and shunned for being heretical.
Still, perhaps the influx of South and Central Americans with their cultures' greater focus on family and kin will be the building stone to an american Renaissance? Family is the foundation of every soceity, culture and civilisation, yes?
Well, Central and South America encompass quite a lot of different local cultures and norms.
California and the Southwest states along the border were built on a strong traditional Spanish/European Mexican culture.
Many of the migrants coming in today from Central America speak Spanish as at least their second language and perhaps even their third, depending on their community. They have zero in common, really, with Mexicans from non-indigenous backgrounds, or with Colombians, or Venezuelans, or Brazilians, all of whom are distinctive from one another.
It always surprised me in Pakistan that so many largely uneducated people coming from the agricultural and laboring classes nevertheless could quote poetry and classical aphorisms etc. etc. and there was a very strong hunger for education even if there wasn't a realistic hope in hell of that improving the long-term prospects of any particular individual kid from that background, because of all the social barriers to advancement/corruption in HS and university admissions etc. There was no shortage of idiots but there was at least a powerful cultural preference for education.
The attitudes of people who will stay in migrant agricultural work and make their kids work with them, too, for the short-term benefit of the family but to the great detriment of the future of the kids are different. A certain absence of forward thinking. And accessing free benefits of a welfare state doesn't fix that.
I disagree. People formed community in the the prairies and the West, long before there were cities. The native populations also had society.
They were exclusionary communities.
Actually, you can add Swedes back into our original cultural heritage. One of our oldest colonies, on the lower Delaware River, was New Sweden, founded during the Thirty Years War in the 1600s. It was a little too small, and soon got taken over by Dutch New Amsterdam, which in turn was taken over by the British and renamed 'New York'.
Of course, the great Nordic migration to the US was in the late 1800s, but there has been a Swedish presence here going back almost as far as the English, Dutch, and French.
The cultural/ethnic uniformity didn’t exist until Hiroshima and Nagasaki took down the elites in power.
What are they actively doing to stop it? For the most part, I don't see any indication. The only difference I see is that government under conservatives, might be expanding at a slower rate. That's like a fat guy only gaining a half pound a day instead of a pound a day. "Reduction in increase" should not be the goal, but rather "an increase in the reduction" of government.
Yes, gato clearly confuses left/right with democrat/republican. Just do the word substitution, and it becomes an excellent article.
Agreed, it's otherwise excellent.
Understanding that convid was simply a training exercise for the "global warming" tyranny to come is the most important message we need to get out to normies....
Cannot understate this.
Except that the same sheeple who bought in on “Covid” will be the same who believe in “climate change” & that draconian measures MUST be done, even to global detriment, damage & death
What difference at this point does it make? AOC said in Oct 2018 that we only had 12 years left. Everything seems to culminate in 2030.
Most of the population is too drugged to notice or care. Just say no to drugs: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-high
And not all drugs are things that must be ingested.
Mr T said, "Lil kids shouldn't do no drugs." 🤷♂️
There are some miraculous substances which, if used sensibly, can truly expand vision, understanding and focus (this last may be a paradox with “expand”.
Focus on searching for knowledge and truth and you will receive drug-free reality expansion without the nasty side effects.
"We have smarter communists this time" just means they're more efficient in getting to the murdery part quickly.
Couldn't smarter communists also mean they give up communism before attempting it?
Maybe cleverer, then.
"they're more efficient in getting to the murdery part quickly."
Are they? My guess is that C0VID was supposed to kill a lot more people, and the poison death jabs were going to finish off the rest. That hasn't happened, even though many have had four or five shots total.
They play more than one line of offense.
Ronald Reagan nailed it when he noted that "The nine most frightening words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'. Government has convinced itself, and a lot of us, that its purpose is to solve "problems". The problem with that is often the "problem" was created by government in the first place. German sociologist, Max Weber, decades ago, defined what a bureaucracy is and what it does. And what it does it increase in size to the point that self-perpetuation is its primary, and perhaps only, purpose. The Great Society, devised by Lyndon Johnson and the Democrap party, minus the inconvenient John F Kennedy, is a perfect example of this. 95% of the "problems" it was created to fix still exist, 60 years later, but the bureaus and agencies created to do the job have increased exponentially in size, authority, and budget. Bureaucracy and its concomitant bureaucrap are a genuinely dangerous problem to which there are solutions, but none of which are easy or pleasant.
We can see now that what they fear most is a widespread knowledge of facts. The twitter papers are a real window into the Heart of Darkness.
Absolutely! This is why in centuries past the church and nobility wanted to keep the masses illiterate....they alone wanted to be the ones to define and tell the people what was what. In this way, they could control the plebes more easily.
"the greatest enemy of we the people is not left or right. it’s bureaucracy and technocracy." Right, but how do we make them go away? What actual steps can Team Reality follow to (for example) shut down NIH?
Rather then tearing down dysfunctional systems, setting up alternatives in the form of small, decentralized communities of a parallel economy. Easier said than done. Community activist groups, small educational co-ops, neighborhood watch groups ... possible ways to start. I am finishing my career as an educator, supplementing my meager pension by doing contract work for largely dysfunctional public schools in West Tokyo.
On the other hand, I am a member of a couple of loosely organized local groups ... one is a roving soup kitchen supporting the homeless around Shinjuku station, another is a drinking/camping group that consciously tries to include those with medical handicaps.
Will be drinking (and parsing the Japanese take on the plandemic) next week after school, and take a walk about with the soup group the week after. The members of these groups are members of other similar groups, making a loose network (cells?) of human relationships independent of their institutional workplace or government bureaucracy. Even though I am not Japanese, I feel the empathy-driven connections, and mutual support.
It would not take much for a parallel 'system' of barter-trade of skills, services, and goods to naturally emerge as things become tough. Some such mutual help along practical lines has already emerged ... just not enough to ween us from wage-slave dependence.
This is a difficult question and one that needs a lot of thought. I have some suggestions in my substack. Comments and criticisms welcome!
I just subscribed. Thank you for putting your ideas out there. I agree with the others who commented "vote" and "build parallel systems," and I do those things (meet the mom who organized the weekly 5k competition for kids who were deprived of school sports in 2020), but the last politician I remember talking about shutting down NIH was Ron Paul (not Rand, but Ron), and parallel systems are nice, but the official system is the one that already takes an ever-larger share of our dollars every year. All politicians (with the rare exception of the third-party guy who gets trounced) are two heads of a one-party system that serves only itself. I can vote for the Republican who promises smaller government, but he means "less monstrous increases in staffing and funding," not "Dept of Education ends next week."
They've been playing a game of 'boil the frog' on us for a very long time.
"Well just turn off the heat," isn't likely to get immediate traction. Incrementality, if it's not too late.
Might be too late. Hope not.
Might as well throw my ideas into the ring as well!
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/this-is-not-a-drill-part-2
Thank you for the link... although I'll respectfully say two things from my first quick glance at it: Showing up at school board meetings with data doesn't get mask mandates repealed; sending your kids to school without masks, knowing they'll be sent home for a week before the school board caves, does. This is literally true (see Volusia County, FL, last September, and compare it with every other county, where parents complained at meetings, with data and studies, but went ahead and dutifully put masks on Jill and Johnny so their perfect attendance didn't get f'd up). The other is, Can we please not use the nasty metaverse term "meatspace" for real life? It makes me want to cry and vomit at the same time. The world (the actual world: trees, humans, animals, beaches, sky) is beautiful and primal and real. It is not "meat," and using that reductivist term is a major turnoff. Neal Stephenson would not be on our side here. Let's not use his vocab. Please.
Vote and constantly make your voice heard to those you voted for, especially in the House where they have the power of the purse and can remove funding from these people. If they don’t deliver, vote differently next time and continue to put pressure on them. Also, participate in local politics. Put pressure on your AG to file suits against the bureaucracy and challenge their rule in the courts. Other than that, I have no clue! But, El Gato is 100% right here.
LOL votes.
I’m still laughing
Vote was the last option. now, there are no options.
John, go read up on the boxes that our republic stands on.
Somehow I don't think reading is going to help, but I could be wrong.
Fascist.
No time to participate in local politics...so many comments to read through here. And I'm a slow reader. Agree at the Local level. Will not consent to State and Federal. My mental microbiome requires a fair amount of sarcasm to maintain peak performance.
Then at very least, start by searching out info on school, municipal, and county candidates, well in advance of elections.
You don't even need to run for office, or donate. You at very least need to start being informed before casting a ballot. If you don't know a candidate's positions, don't just automatically vote for them.
Thank you for this. It’s comforting in a weird way to know that other people are formulating almost your exact thoughts- even if they are terrifying. I’m a lay person who knows a little “science” (that’s like a dirty word these days) and from the get go I knew something was very off intuitively- I had nothing to back it up except gut feeling. I started gravitating toward alternative sources of info and found you and others and honestly my criteria for trust was just a “knowing”. People are so removed from nature and their own rhythms that they can’t see evil right in front of them. I often wonder which politicians are just useful idiots too. I’m very naive though, I’ve learned over the past few years. I used to trust everyone and it’s hard to accept that people could not be human
I blame the Fourth Estate more than any other institution. We need an institution full of skeptical SOBs who challenge all the bogus and dubious narratives and aren't afraid to challenge the pronouncements of the "experts" and "authorities."
If the free press did its most important job, false narratives would not have become "settled science." "Conventional wisdom" wouldn't be settled either. The politicians are awful and part of the problem, but even they would hold hearings and seek the truth if the press had alerted the public that X truth was probably BS. The politicians would then grandstand to expose the liars and frauds - if for no other reason than to make themselves look good.
Some will say the "watchdog" press has always been captured, but I don't think the press was as 100-percent captured in the past as it is today.
Basically, if there is no influential "watchdog" press, the Powers that Be know they will not be held accountable for anything ... and so they act accordingly.
I have said for years that the true cancer in America is the alphabet legacy media. And it's gotten worse, far worse, year by year.
If the media just reported news straight-up, didn't fabricate or suppress, IMO the Democrat Party as constituted over the past 2 decades would be at most a fringe player in American politics. It's the media that ought to be the first, and probably only necessary, front when the next American Revolution or civil war erupts.
Building on my comments below that it's the Fourth Estate that has really sunk society, here's a piece I wrote at my Substack. It's a follow-up article to a simple feature story I wrote about a Minnesota man who died after getting his Pfizer jab. As I point out, there are probably 40,000 mainstream journalists who could have quickly done the same article I did ... But not one has done this. I'm not aware of any mainstream newspaper or magazine that's done ONE major story on a person who died from vaccine injuries. This fraction - 0-out-of-40,000 - shows us how "captured" the mainstream press has become. It shows us that the groupthink in these newsrooms must be 100 percent.
This is the real "bleak" story - the important stories can't even be written; the major scandals won't ever be exposed.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/my-vaccine-death-story-set-readership
You're 100% correct.
A short story: I don't watch the MSM at all. My liberal SIL does. I knew about those donating to the Canadian truckers having their bank accounts suspended. She had no idea.
If CNN/MSNBC doesn't cover it, it doesn't happen in their world.
Imagine how comfortable that must feel.
We have lots and lots of such people over here: state media doesn't talk about it? Hasn't happened or isn't true. State media say it's bad? It's bad. Tomorrow it might be good, but today it is bad.
It just goes to show, there's no functional difference between a lie we choose to believe and a truth we choose to reject.
There is simply no way out without a catastrophe.
Years ago, when Stephen Colbert's right-wing character turned "I don't see race" into a punchline, I knew exactly where that was headed. Because I read history. But a huge number of people just go along with any idea, no matter how idiotic, as long as it comes from some perceived authority figure (in this case, a snarky left-wing comedian with a bookish image).
I spent years arguing with NPCs trying to explain why abandoning the notion that people should be treated as individuals is a bad idea. I got nowhere. Most people simply will not listen to any idea that deviates from what an authority figure tells them until blood is running in the streets. It's sad, but it's true. It's just a matter of how deep the abyss we fall into winds up being. So buckle up, look out for number 1, and damn the rest. There's no way to save them.
All they do is identify the "politically correct" position and then take that position. When most everyone has the same view, there is no risk you will be criticized for holding the same position.
If you want to move up the organizational pyramid at your agency or company, don't take any contrarian or dissident positions. If all the key decisions are wrong (and harmful), this doesn't matter. You are still safe. This does matter, however, to the rest of us.
The wrong decision or position almost always prevails. Not only that, these people now work overtime to cancel, smear and attack anyone who challenges the "authorized" narrative.
Exactly. What I realized in most organizations is that failure or success matter far less than one would imagine vs. whether you are inline with conventional wisdom. It's one of the reasons why so many organizations make catastrophic mistakes.
“Nothing that requires the labor of another person is a human right”
^This is perfect and concise. We need more people to actually grasp what it means.
Being forced to produce for those who refuse to do so, wouldn't that be called slavery?
most politicians are also terrible at getting elected. They just have a good team around them. They also have people with influence who have dirt on them and so let them get into power so they can be used.
E.G. Presidentish LGB-FJB - everyone in the world - China, Russia, Ukraine to start - have dirt on that evil corruptocrat & his grifter family
Because of how and for how long this has metastasized, I don't think it can be torn down brick-by-brick and rebuilt.
As with a snake, we will have to cut off its head, and only then can it be rebuilt brick-by-brick.
As the ol' maxim goes, "you can vote your way into tyranny...". Until enough people pay dearly for what they've done and what they continue to do, until enough "disincentives" are brought to bear upon them, they will continue unabated. In *every* realm, not just politics.
Look at the recent revelations about what goes on at The Francis Parker School in Chicago. And Balenciaga. And the American Academy of Pediatrics. And too many children's hospitals in America.
And what's happening in New Zealand. And in Australia. The list is seemingly endless.
Until enough, shall we say, disincentives, are brought to bear upon the perps who are doing this sh*t, they will not stop. They. Will. Not. Stop.
Well said, Andrew (the Great)!
So, what must we then do?
I have my thoughts. They must remain thoughts.
To your point about The Experts getting it wrong - I think a major problem is they hold the a priori assumption that the official data they're working off is true and reliable.
Our excess deaths in Australia are at 17% and The Experts think vax injuries have nothing to do with it, because so few injuries and deaths are 'officially recorded'. I'd wager that it has never occurred to any of them that perhaps the data is not a true reflection of the state of things.
https://rebekahbarnett.substack.com/p/10-reasons-vaccine-injuries-and-deaths
This is absolutely true. The number of times I have been at conferences and heard someone respond to the question “Hoe reliable is the data?” with “well it isn’t very good but it’s the best we have” followed by a paper assuming the data is God’s own Truth is maddening.
I keep going back to the thought that Bankster-Fraud was able to pull it off for so long because, connections and connivances aside, the egos of the people he was pitching would not allow them to admit, maybe even to themselves, that they had no idea what he was talking about but that it "sounded smart" and was out of their wheelhouses, so leave it to the boy geniuses.
Someone tried to pitch me on a pyramid scheme called Hyperfund last year, and I watched several friends make money on it, but I sensed that someone would end up holding the bag. It was clear that the marketing pitch was to female solopreneurs in small or spiritual-work sectors who would be impressed by the supposed smarts and credentials and noble, world-saving vision of a Chinese crypto-bro who quoted Mises, who wanted to enfranchise them to this exciting new world.
I just learned what a "pig-fattening" scam looks like, and how the scammers use the media hype on, and ignorance of, the crypto space to suck people into believing that outlandish returns are possible forever.
And this is what is happening to "our" elected officials. They are being pig-fattened by scammers and their egos lap it up. You cannot cheat an honest man, and Diogenes would burn through a lot of oil before he gave up and died of despair in the halls of elected power.