One insidious thing that I have noticed is how being in the 'in' group might start off innocently enough, but in order to keep your membership in the group, the lies get more and more outrageous. Drop off the train at any point, and you'll find yourself on the outside -- and even more hated than if you had been on the outside the whole time.
You're on a roll, gato! Yesterday's lawn darts and now this. You've got the clearest common sense I've read in all the noise. Thank you. All hail chairman meow!
I'm not sure how many here are religious or otherwise have a transcendental horizon for their moral landscape, but: one thing that really scares me not just about the response to COVID, but about our world in general, is that the controlling majority seem incapable of invoking anything like natural law. The basic premise that entities have a nature and that you should understand and treat them according to their nature seems to be completely absent from public discourse.
In a more sane world, for example, it would never be forgotten that the family is the basic building block of any community. Which is not to say that the bonds of family are absolute -- abusive situations can happen -- but that you should think AWFULLY HARD before challenging the bond between parents and their children. In a sane world, "We have to break through this idea that kids belong to their families" would instantly get everyone's backs up. It would be immediately recognized as a profoundly anti-social statement that attacks the very nature of what it means to be a family, what it means to be a parent. It would not be entertained for a second.
What do we need to do to make that sane world a reality?
I’m a New Zealander and can confirm that that witch we have as PM is truly evil. She loves power and she adores creating divisiveness to get others to do her dirty work for her.
The latest is that they banned rapid antigen tests last year because we couldn’t be trusted with them (took away her control). Then after most of a year begging, businesses were allowed to import them so as to help keep their businesses running. The govt failed to order more than one per person themselves. Yesterday they requisitioned all RAT orders coming into the country. Apparently they will reallocate them according to need - probably along racial lines.
Incompetent, lazy, stupid, and evil. And she’s the best of the whole government. They have destroyed my country.
When people raised in cults reject a particular ideology, they tend to find another--perhaps even quite opposite in doctrine--as a substitute. You rarely find them becoming independent thinkers even if they think they are...
And funny thing. As a child of the '50s raised in a strongly culturally but not orthodox Jewish home, with grandparents and their large extended family all immigrants who'd fled Czarist/Revolutionary Russian Empire (and, unknown to me then, a great-great uncle and family who'd been murdered in Uman by the Nazis), color me overstuffed with the heroic mythos of the kibbutz and the--ain't it ironic!--glorious workers' paradise that was building in Israel.
And then some decades ago a study came out of the now-adult children of the kibbutz system. They sure had plenty of group cohesion but struggled terribly with intimate emotional relationships. Kids of the collective and they hungered all their lives for the nuclear family they were bereft of and could not successfully create for themselves.
Keep your--pardon me--fucking village. Its only useful purpose is to keep the maneaters from breaching the perimeter. But each to his own hut, with a locked door.
true. i've managed many people over the years. one thing i learned was, when confronted with a lie, to avoid having the liar repeat the lie - because the more they repeated the lie, the more they believed the lie. i'd always try to give people an out. (trap a rat in a corner and find out.)
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I have been reading Shoshana Zuboff's book "The age of Surveillance Capitalism" this week and have started to understand the structure of the propaganda a bit better. Many people have seen the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma", which is a small subset of the material in the book. The Cambridge Analytica "Scandal" is a minuscule example of the techniques involved in imposing the "narrative" on the populace.
The pervasive surveillance through Google, FB, Twitter, Yahoo, whatever you use online down to your ISP and particularly your Android "Smart" phone is used with AI/ML (machine learning) to predict your activities. The next step is providing you with "options" which you will favour. This generates a positive feedback loop, which as any engineer will tell you is quite a dangerous condition. Most of us are susceptible, we get a fine Dopamine surge when our comments are "liked", allowing the narrative to spread with a far greater R0 than any virus. As noted in the post, the repetition from above and the internal confirmation are extremely potent in maintaining the lies. Cognitive dissonance is a far weaker antidote for most people.
Every variety of the monstrous pile of dung known as collectivism can be summed up in a single sentence:
"Hand over your stuff and do what I tell you or I will throw you into a cage and kill you if you resist."
Everything else they say is just window dressing and emotional bullshit. As gato says, there is no "common good". There is also no "fair" or "free" or "social contract" or "social justice" or any of the countless other euphemisms, absurdities and other shiny objects they use to distract and rile up the booboisie.
These are the people that during the Reign of Terror roasted baby aristocrats alive in bread ovens, bagged up children and drowned them in rivers, and lopped off many thousands of heads.
In the last century or so these murderous bastards have slaughtered hundreds of millions of innocents and oppressed, impoverished and displaced countless hundreds of millions more.
They have destroyed every singe society and economy they've seized control of, and they are well on their way to destroying what is left of the formerly free world.
Like a gigantic nest of fleas, they have infested every level of government and every major institution, so that now sane people are demonized and relegated to watching and listening in horror as evil clowns like Comrades Ardern, Biden, Castro-Trudeau, Macron, Merkel, Fauci and legions of other officious apparatchiks down to the local "health board" rule us with imperial edicts have would have made Nero pause.
After this track record, imagine the level of depravity required to consider or call oneself a collectivist or socialist.
They are barbarians. All of them.
Gato is spot on when he says we must be rid of them.
“…these people are sick, and it makes them dangerous”
That’s exactly right. They have a perverse ideology that is really a kind of psychological illness. They are separated from reality.
They “know” a priori that what they believe is true, so they have no need to check their ideas with empirical evidence.
And they are unwilling to listen to empirical evidence that conflicts with their prior beliefs. This is confirmation bias on steroids and PCP…
Anyway, this post shows why the Bad Cat is great. I don’t know of anyone who has fought harder and more effectively for rationality and freedom since Covid hysteria set in.
El Gato you are fast becoming my favourite feline next to The Cat from Red Dwarf.
On a serious note this was absolutely brilliant and a must read for anyone who wishes to understand our current malaise. The genius of your writing is such that it not only addresses the macro level but also the micro as in how our colleagues/friends/family have been affected by this big lie.
I've wondered the last year or two if we now officially have a higher percentage of people with narcissistic personality disorder? I feel like I've stumbled across more in the last few years than ever in my life, and it would only take a certain % of these people in positions of power to destroy the world. The only way they can be dealt with is to be removed, ignored and stowed away on an island like Napoleon.
I'd pay a substantial sum to be there when the Canadian convoy arrives and Castro's Bastard finds out exactly who is no longer going to be tolerated by whom.
One insidious thing that I have noticed is how being in the 'in' group might start off innocently enough, but in order to keep your membership in the group, the lies get more and more outrageous. Drop off the train at any point, and you'll find yourself on the outside -- and even more hated than if you had been on the outside the whole time.
You're on a roll, gato! Yesterday's lawn darts and now this. You've got the clearest common sense I've read in all the noise. Thank you. All hail chairman meow!
I'm not sure how many here are religious or otherwise have a transcendental horizon for their moral landscape, but: one thing that really scares me not just about the response to COVID, but about our world in general, is that the controlling majority seem incapable of invoking anything like natural law. The basic premise that entities have a nature and that you should understand and treat them according to their nature seems to be completely absent from public discourse.
In a more sane world, for example, it would never be forgotten that the family is the basic building block of any community. Which is not to say that the bonds of family are absolute -- abusive situations can happen -- but that you should think AWFULLY HARD before challenging the bond between parents and their children. In a sane world, "We have to break through this idea that kids belong to their families" would instantly get everyone's backs up. It would be immediately recognized as a profoundly anti-social statement that attacks the very nature of what it means to be a family, what it means to be a parent. It would not be entertained for a second.
What do we need to do to make that sane world a reality?
I’m a New Zealander and can confirm that that witch we have as PM is truly evil. She loves power and she adores creating divisiveness to get others to do her dirty work for her.
The latest is that they banned rapid antigen tests last year because we couldn’t be trusted with them (took away her control). Then after most of a year begging, businesses were allowed to import them so as to help keep their businesses running. The govt failed to order more than one per person themselves. Yesterday they requisitioned all RAT orders coming into the country. Apparently they will reallocate them according to need - probably along racial lines.
Incompetent, lazy, stupid, and evil. And she’s the best of the whole government. They have destroyed my country.
When people raised in cults reject a particular ideology, they tend to find another--perhaps even quite opposite in doctrine--as a substitute. You rarely find them becoming independent thinkers even if they think they are...
And funny thing. As a child of the '50s raised in a strongly culturally but not orthodox Jewish home, with grandparents and their large extended family all immigrants who'd fled Czarist/Revolutionary Russian Empire (and, unknown to me then, a great-great uncle and family who'd been murdered in Uman by the Nazis), color me overstuffed with the heroic mythos of the kibbutz and the--ain't it ironic!--glorious workers' paradise that was building in Israel.
And then some decades ago a study came out of the now-adult children of the kibbutz system. They sure had plenty of group cohesion but struggled terribly with intimate emotional relationships. Kids of the collective and they hungered all their lives for the nuclear family they were bereft of and could not successfully create for themselves.
Keep your--pardon me--fucking village. Its only useful purpose is to keep the maneaters from breaching the perimeter. But each to his own hut, with a locked door.
true. i've managed many people over the years. one thing i learned was, when confronted with a lie, to avoid having the liar repeat the lie - because the more they repeated the lie, the more they believed the lie. i'd always try to give people an out. (trap a rat in a corner and find out.)
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis
I have been reading Shoshana Zuboff's book "The age of Surveillance Capitalism" this week and have started to understand the structure of the propaganda a bit better. Many people have seen the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma", which is a small subset of the material in the book. The Cambridge Analytica "Scandal" is a minuscule example of the techniques involved in imposing the "narrative" on the populace.
The pervasive surveillance through Google, FB, Twitter, Yahoo, whatever you use online down to your ISP and particularly your Android "Smart" phone is used with AI/ML (machine learning) to predict your activities. The next step is providing you with "options" which you will favour. This generates a positive feedback loop, which as any engineer will tell you is quite a dangerous condition. Most of us are susceptible, we get a fine Dopamine surge when our comments are "liked", allowing the narrative to spread with a far greater R0 than any virus. As noted in the post, the repetition from above and the internal confirmation are extremely potent in maintaining the lies. Cognitive dissonance is a far weaker antidote for most people.
Every variety of the monstrous pile of dung known as collectivism can be summed up in a single sentence:
"Hand over your stuff and do what I tell you or I will throw you into a cage and kill you if you resist."
Everything else they say is just window dressing and emotional bullshit. As gato says, there is no "common good". There is also no "fair" or "free" or "social contract" or "social justice" or any of the countless other euphemisms, absurdities and other shiny objects they use to distract and rile up the booboisie.
These are the people that during the Reign of Terror roasted baby aristocrats alive in bread ovens, bagged up children and drowned them in rivers, and lopped off many thousands of heads.
In the last century or so these murderous bastards have slaughtered hundreds of millions of innocents and oppressed, impoverished and displaced countless hundreds of millions more.
They have destroyed every singe society and economy they've seized control of, and they are well on their way to destroying what is left of the formerly free world.
Like a gigantic nest of fleas, they have infested every level of government and every major institution, so that now sane people are demonized and relegated to watching and listening in horror as evil clowns like Comrades Ardern, Biden, Castro-Trudeau, Macron, Merkel, Fauci and legions of other officious apparatchiks down to the local "health board" rule us with imperial edicts have would have made Nero pause.
After this track record, imagine the level of depravity required to consider or call oneself a collectivist or socialist.
They are barbarians. All of them.
Gato is spot on when he says we must be rid of them.
We will never be really civilized until we do.
“…these people are sick, and it makes them dangerous”
That’s exactly right. They have a perverse ideology that is really a kind of psychological illness. They are separated from reality.
They “know” a priori that what they believe is true, so they have no need to check their ideas with empirical evidence.
And they are unwilling to listen to empirical evidence that conflicts with their prior beliefs. This is confirmation bias on steroids and PCP…
Anyway, this post shows why the Bad Cat is great. I don’t know of anyone who has fought harder and more effectively for rationality and freedom since Covid hysteria set in.
Remind me of one of my favorite quotes.
“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
El Gato you are fast becoming my favourite feline next to The Cat from Red Dwarf.
On a serious note this was absolutely brilliant and a must read for anyone who wishes to understand our current malaise. The genius of your writing is such that it not only addresses the macro level but also the micro as in how our colleagues/friends/family have been affected by this big lie.
Amazing and Thank You.
A group I know was happy to show papers at a Coney Island restaurant, of course someone didn’t have papers and we couldn’t get in. 🤷♀️😁
Jacinda Ardern reminds me of Dolores Umbridge.
It's time we brought out Dumbledore's Army with Weasley Wizarding Wheezes and become ungovernable.
I've wondered the last year or two if we now officially have a higher percentage of people with narcissistic personality disorder? I feel like I've stumbled across more in the last few years than ever in my life, and it would only take a certain % of these people in positions of power to destroy the world. The only way they can be dealt with is to be removed, ignored and stowed away on an island like Napoleon.
I'd pay a substantial sum to be there when the Canadian convoy arrives and Castro's Bastard finds out exactly who is no longer going to be tolerated by whom.