“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ― Mark Twain
Jonestown is no longer a compound in Guyana. It is a global digital cult that pumps in kool-aid 24/7. Those who spread cult messaging are the Sacklers of information. NPC PMC consoomers with poor information diets will deteriorate further into broken-brained BlueAnon Boomerwaffens.
We are the media now. They are the noise, we are the signal. Democracy dies in the darkness, but mockery thrives in the light!
I’m reminded of this wisdom and that it’s missing.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
If individuals would develop their personal character this way, then collectively we would get along fine.
Their parents didn't bring them up to have any personal character, or any morals for that matter. They were brought up to believe only they matter in every way.
I try to live my life very much in the spirit Johnny Be Real represents.
My mom and sister are way in the cult. They aren’t talking to me right now. There’s too much cognitive dissonance between what I represent (a terrifying and alienating witches brew of openly Christian, devoted wife and mother, successful business owner, highly educated Trump voter) and the daughter and sister they love who demonstrates compassion and forgiveness for them. That I’m also disabled (a highly coveted victim label they can claim sympathy for while condescending to me - a win-win) but do not let that define me other than to be grateful for the lessons it’s taught me confounds them deeply. I’m not in the victim/villain/hero construct - very confusing. Best stay away from me. I’m a giant challenge to the world view.
And I’m not big on food coloring, artificial flavors and sugar filled pitchers of liquid hate.
I for one am glad to hear from you about your experience and condition. I do not spend much time on comments on stacks, so I may not have known you if you hadn't shared here as well.
My son and his wife are leftists...and I sure didn't raise him this way. I know now when he started to break towards this insanity. Hindsight is 20/20, but it's not like he would have listened- because hormones and the head on his shoulders wasn't what was talking to him....
The Dems thought they "owned" the college educated women. Perhaps they do/did own the coastal elite groups of such women. But as a non-elite educated woman myself, I know rather a LOT of college educated women as well as non-college educated women who never supported Harris and who have always supported Trump....for most of them this is their third time voting for Trump. Furthermore, working women have known and worked around/for/under women who act very much like Harris. We didn't like it AND we recognized those negative personal qualities in her. When 90+% of a person's staff quit, we all know the reason why. The Dems don't seem to understand who their loyal voters are at this point. Nor did they try to find out, which is hard to do when your main focus is simply herding people into voter groups.
Well said. I didn't/don't know anyone who voted for Harris. Sadly, my friends & family - save a couple - don't want to discuss/hear/read anything political. They seem determined to remain uniformed about what's happening in that realm. It's quite vexing! 🤨
A friend of mine voted for her. She likes to portray herself as this well read woman because she reads historical fiction. Her daughter told my daughter “we voted for Kamala because she would have been the first woman!” like that was some sort of reason. Her daughter is 11.
She’s a SAHM but was an early education teacher prior. I’d love to know the degrees/professions these college educated women actually have as I would guess they fall mainly in the useless or the indoctrination degrees (ie teaching). Most intelligent women I know voted for Trump.
Jonestown was never just isolated and in one place. It's been cropping up like some bug-a-boo whack-a-mole since time immemorial. All you have to do is study herd behavior to know, this can happen to us, and maybe far easier. Get one or two skittish herd members running and you have a stampede. And it has served us well on occasion. Do you stand your ground and ask questions or do you wait for the unseen predator that has caused the stampede?
Most people aren't aware of how much systematic media and data manipulation were involved in "the Sackler method," a carefully thought out strategy used to turn family doctors into pushers for pHarma in the middle 20th century.
You can find Art Sackler in the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame (yes, there is such a thing), inducted in 1997 for being the first to sell $100m of a pharmaceutical (Valium).
Suffice it to say, after more than a century of this sort of mass media brainhack/fear porn, coupled with intensive, granular information control, it's not going to be easy to reclaim minds and souls. I'm not terribly hopeful, but I also haven't given up quite yet.
The people who post their meltdowns, write awful social media responses, cut off family and friends over politics seem of a type. Attention seekers whose day-to-day lives don’t provide enough “look at me, how great am I” moments, so they seek it online.
AWFLs suffering Munchausen-by-proxy with their “trans” children. Single, multi- pierced, blue haired harpies who hate men because no man would pay attention to them. Childless cat ladies who loathe their self-inflicted loneliness. Feminist adjacent “men” who think their “gurrl power support” will win them female favor.
Boring real life causes them to seek feedback online, every day. Sad.
It is not their responsibility to deal with the disquiet/discomfort of their existence, rather the responsibility of others to change reality to make their existence less disquieting/discomforting.
I've said before the fear of losing something is a much better motivator than the prospect of gaining something. Right now these people are willing to do anything to avoid looking "defeat" in the eye because they would have to confront the fact that their search for the "divine abode" beyond the "firmament" is grounded on "astroturf".
In a way it's more of a "religion" than a cult. I mean a delusion harbored by an individual is mental illness, by small groups a cult, but by many a religion. The difference between a cult and a religion is political power and real estate (in this case the institution are all "owned" by the same ideology). This ideology provides everything religions do: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.
Mental illness is definitely involved but i also think it's gravitational force is an over abundance of optimism in their search for some fictitious utopian future that will never exist. This is prone to exploitation because it's easy to sell a transcendent promise of something that doesn't exist to those that require having their "purpose" provided externally.
When you've "bought" that, you are not bound to the boundaries of empathy because anything/anyone who challenges that inherently challenges the ultimate sign of their fidelity to a "righteous" cause: PURITY. Given that, it is very dangerous because the most destructive of "religions" are the ones that wish to gain some ultimate "power" as a reward for tearing down and overthrowing a "morally unworthy" system. I think that's why it manifests itself individually as a patient on a mainlined drip-feed of guilt, self righteousness and intolerance.
What they've really bought is the commodity that the MSM is best at selling these days: RHETORIC. This rhetoric releases a feel-good chemical release of dopamine (literally) because it helps them interpret and remember info in a way that validates their existing belief system, while simultaneously ignoring/dismissing any information that controverts their beliefs/feelings. This allows their feelings to become not something you have, rather who you are...and in the pilgrimage to purity they not only believe they must puke out their feelings(online or otherwise) for all to see, but that it is a necessary ritual to advertise their path of purity as a acquittal for all previous "mortal sins"; a ritualistic "chanting" of sorts.
Much like a religion they have their own language, rituals, semantic "stops" and thought-terminating clichés that immediately dismiss dissent or flawed reasoning they rationalize. In this way it about the performative not informative because it goes beyond reflecting/describing who they are, rather it's creates who they are.
Some have said it's a religion/cult without a leader. I disagree,i think their "Leader" is The Almighty Algorithm that keeps them in their isolation silo by only presenting ideas/info/rhetoric that manufacture, nurture and reinforce their fanaticism, but just as importantly it keeps them from stumbling upon "adversarial" ides/POV, unless they actively search for it. And because of this their worldview is based on two sides of the same false coin. Voila, their ignorance is as good as your knowledge. BTW this only going to get worse the more sophisticated tech becomes at distilling metadata into personalized content/rhetoric because in a sense it's self-arranges in a personalized recursive function. I think this will give them a sense of "control" they may have felt alluded them previously in their lives of quiet desperation; a "personal Jesus" they manufactured of themselves. Through their personal Jesus they can become as "loud" as they want to now.
In some way they worship Trump and hang on his every word in an inverse relationship. Its like the more Trump says that conflicts with the internalized external narrative that fills the void which defines the center of gravity for their ego, the more ardent they become in their devotion to their fanaticism...because it fundamentally couldn't exist without his "words". And the media fuels this with a chameleon like arsenal of rhetoric/misinformation/diversion.
My theory is the MSM is their pope and Trump is who they worship. And since the pope is the medium by which they can commune with their anti-god, in their pursuit of purity, they must rely on the medias interpretation of the anti-gods words/behavior to chart their pilgrimage. Through this process they receive their own holy language that can only be deciphered by the pope. And because of this the first thing they're willing to change about themselves is language/ideas/speech....and, counterintuitively, it's also the LAST thing they're willingly to change because the words/language we breath literally define us.
Ultimately this is why they feel we must be silenced.
Since I haven't listened to much in the way of the MSM for decades, most of what I heard about TRUMP was secondhand news aside from catching the occasional rally unedited. Ever since podcasts, I've been downloading and getting my news through this venue since 2004. One of the major factors was I was tired of the small bites of terrestrial programming obfuscated by commercials, and being imprisoned by whatever it was terrestrial radio/cable offered.
The problem with those who seek to maintain their echo chamber through algorithm, is because many of us were forced to live that false reality, we don't want a repeat of it, and therefore are constantly seeking it out to push against it.
"Masks don't work." is my rallying cry. And along with it "There was no pandemic."
I don't think the snowflakes hang on to Trump's every word because they mostly can't stand to hear him speak so they take the word of the MSM that, "Trump said (insert any Leftist lie here)". That is why they actually do beleive Trump called for a real "bloodbath" and said whats-her-face, the RINO ought to be shot, the Russian hoax, not Hunter's laptop lies, etc.
In a sense we have all taken swigs off of the "fictitious utopian future that will never exist" bottle over the years.
"There ought to be a law...."
"In a country as rich as ours we should never...."
"why don't they take that money they gave illegals and give it to......"
All in the same line of thinking the Uncle Federal is that rich benevolent uncle that will take care of us.
This is why we have a system where Trump and his team have literally FOUR THOUSAND political appointments to make. And so many laws on the books that we are all probably lawbreakers at some point in our lives, and thus vulnerable to the enforcers. THAT is not freedom.
Yes the victim as victor is what has driven me the most crazy for the last ~15 years. Seems to have gained a lot of steam during the Barack "you didn't build that" Obama years, and then just kept on rolling.
How about the Dems and their "we're fighting for our freedom" BS? I don't think leftists can get more delusional than they already are, but I reserve the right to be wrong because I never thought they could get as stupid as they are now.
I am pushing 60, so may not live long enough to see how the history books treat this era. All of these technological advances, information in our pocket that would have required a massive library 50 years ago, and so on., And yet the culture pushes gender change, says there can be pregnant men and decries things like micro-aggressions and asks for safe spaces.
When you put it like that - which is pretty much the brass tacks of it - it makes one wonder - will they ever pull out of it? And, if not, how does this influence others in their orbit - children, spouse, friends, etc.?
I must say that the women that I have see on X who declare that 'I won't let a man come near my body' are the women that no man - possibly no woman - would WANT to come near. 😳
Uh, we're on here seeking feedback every day or so. What does that make us? My real life is definitely not boring. Strange as it may sound, I actually read and reply to blogs as a way to relax from a high stress job.
Substack isn’t exactly X or FB or IG or TikTok. It takes time to read many of the articles here, a modicum of intelligence to understand the points being made, and then respond thoughtfully. Those other social media sites are filled with liberal screaming, both figuratively and literally. Kinda like Karen did on this string.
And wow...the projection. This past week on twitter I ave been interacting with someone who thinks you living life normally not wearing a mask is tentamount to being a "pac man" of aerosolized SARS infected fecal matter. Because I stated "masks don't work." He thinks I am the fragile one, "coping" in fear and panic and by way of dealing with it is denying its existence. Yes, that takes some mental gymnastics.
They fret about micrograms of aerosolized poisons while binging kilograms of metabolic poisons, and the more it makes them inflamed and obese, the more they call it beauty.
Hear me out: What if we DON’T try to fix them - and feature them instead?
What we see as politics is usually a contest of status. The left’s success, and most of its efforts, were about coding leftism as high status. In contrast, the seething, doubling down on unpopular insistences, and public tantrums are very, very low status behavior.
The more focus we put on this, and the more they help us define this picture as The Left, the faster we code leftism as low status (and very unmanly). And win.
Speaking of darker, as a substantial minority become more visibly deranged and threatening, it becomes easier to gain support for brutal solutions to said threat. I don’t want that, though; they’re too useful.
Wow! You're just betting better & better as this was simply brilliant! Honestly, my subscription to you is some of the best $ I spend all year. What did Erasmus say? When I get money, I subscribe to El Gato Malo, and if there's any left, I buy food.
Mental illness is progressively degenerative if not treated, and those who suffer from it can be fairly easily manipulated by people cynical and evil enough to do it. The manipulation is also degenerative, getting worse over time and quite dangerous if frustrated. But don't take my word for it. Just look around and listen. Difficult to miss it. Trump has a seriously difficult future ahead of him, but I, for one, intend to do whatever I can to Make America Great Again. Fun is where you find it.
What are the most effective movements of this type in history, how did they proliferate, and what did, or could have, stopped them?
Bolsheviks, Maoists, Nazis, at times the church. I think amplification with ridicule of the obscenity of this behavior is important (if your girl is on tiktok talking about poisoning you, get out but also don’t ignore it; there should be some real consequences, just as there should have been after Kathy Griffin’s beheading stunt.
But also, and more importantly, the message that most people are NOT like this needs to proliferate. Don’t just share the crazies. Share the normals. Do business with people who don’t hate you, and don’t do business with those who do.
The isolation and silencing was effective during covid. We, the dissidents and disapprovers, were the majority, much, if not all, of the time. But they made it hard for us to find each other.
Luckily, I haven't run into anyone w TDS. But - behavior IS contagious - so my personal philosophy is to treat others as kindly as would like them to treat me & hope for the best.
Anyone else notice all of the Robert Reich types only allow paid subscribers to comment on their Substack posts. Thank you Gato for allowing an open forum.
Just in general, I appreciate it when substack authors let people comment freely. On a few occasions I´ve liked what a substacker wrote and wanted to say something complementary but was blocked by the Paid Subscribers Only thing.
Elon Musk genuinely seeks to preserve humanity. He thought he would do so by colonizing Mars. But at some point he realized that before he could do that, he would first have to preserve truth itself, so he bought Twitter. And it changed history by breaking the authoritarian stranglehold on media.
A "grab 'em'", "I could shoot somebody on 5th Ave.", twice-impeached, 91 indictments receiving, sociopathic narcissist who is still garnering enough support in the polls to be the likely "Republican" candidate is proof enough that we just can't trust voters all the time to come to the right decision."
After Trump's win, she also ranted that he won because the "price of bacon has increased.
But wait, there's more!:
""Melissa Pxxxxx
6 hours ago
Everybody deserves to vote, but they're not entitled to choose to thoughtlessly burn the country down with that vote."
This is the cultist that you so aptly describe, and she lives among us...
As a Boomer XX Female, I do not like the view. I never liked the view, I cringe when I heard anything from the view.
The good news is these are probably heavily vaxxed viewers. They are going to have serious health issues.
It is no one’s business who I voted for. My Grandparents are probably rolling on their graves because people keep babbling who they voted for. It is nobody’s business.
Yes! Growing up, I was taught that you don’t ask people about their politics, their finances, Health, sex life or faith. it was considered the height of rudeness. One of the things I objected to during the covid times, was the audacity of strangers or even acquaintances demanding to know whether or not I was vaccinated. I wanted to respond to them, that they first need to tell me details of their last colonoscopy.
Now it seems like these are the only topics some people CAN talk about. You try to maintain a neutral conversation but these subjects always seem to slide back in.
"The good news is these are probably heavily vaxxed viewers. They are going to have serious health issues."
Yes, that remains the elephant in the room, doesn't it? At some point, the problem of the fracture may become self limiting in a sense as these cultists are all vaxxed to the hilt and are going to begin suffering major health problems because of it -- if they haven't already, because MAN do people look sick out there. This, in turn, is going to create another major problem for the world, because there are not enough doctors who did not take the vaxx to actually treat the ever-growing legions of seriously sick people.
The view has always been awful. Even when I probably agreed with the majority of them on some issues, it was unwatchable. Something a torturer would play on a loop to gain a confession
"the view viewers are home all day drinking this in"...among other things.
It's almost as if these deranged harridans *want* to conform to stereotypes about female hysteria and instability but are either too cynical or too stupid to realize what they're doing, I can't decide which. Incidentally I have this picture in my head of Joy Reid taking out her earpiece once the cameras are off, laughing and saying, "can you believe people eat this shit up? Where's my bourbon and Beethoven? How are my defence company stocks doing today?" What I *can* be certain of is that this is the end result of decades of the feminization of education and media infiltration; I mean not even the most anti-Nixon or Reagan male network news anchor of those eras would have indulged in this psychotic nonsense in 1972 or 1984. Howard Beale was satire for a reason.
I mentioned somewhere else that we would see a lot of "micro Jonestowns" and that's exactly what's happening.
i suspect joy reid really believes what she peddles. in her world, it's gospel truth because in her mental map, consensus means truth. i don't think she can distinguish between the two nor even wants to.
these are mostly not grifters anymore, they are the true believers that supplant the grifters but do not know the grift is a grift.
it's why they do so much damage. they really think their plans are going to work and do not know enough not to press the clearly marked "end of the world button."
I think the phenomena has always existed, but it has not been as organized, or incentivized as well as it is now. The hive mind of the Third Reich relied on male violence for power, but this hive mindedness seems to rely on female perpetual victimhood. It is suicidal aggression where they make you watch their self destruction. No thank you, TikTok.
It’s an obsession with the evil “patriarchy” of the white Eurocentrists. Egalitarian ideals opened the doors and shattered the ceilings for XX and now they want to complain about the architecture. I see it with my educated, advocating Gen Z nieces who think themselves erudite but have no idea how the Federal Reserve works.
CS Lewis's quote is particularly apt here: Joy is an omnipotent moral busybody, not a robber baron.
"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."
For Joy, she would have to admit everything she believes is wrong. What would remain? She would rather remain sitting on her "end of the world" button.
Turn off the fricking news, avoid all social media news, boycott the MSM and then take a look around you, pay attention and make your own choices and determinations. You just might find that 99% of the news is worthless, unnecessary and to be avoided like the plague it is...even if the new Trump era, if that ever occurs.
Do not trust any MSM news, ever. It will continue to be and always has been nothing but a force for indoctrination and disruption because most people are psychologically asleep and need their fix of others telling them how to think.
That's why they hate Elon with the flames of a billion burning suns. What he did acquiring X and allowing more free speech is intolerable to them. I hope he has REALLY good security! Actually anyone associated with the new administration! I think we're going to get many more would be but hopefully unsuccessful assassins!
My personality and training in philosophy & mathematics leads me to follow a chain of thought to the end ... then start over from a different perspective and see where that leads.
So while I fully agree with bad cat and most of the comments ... a word of caution. We should look in the mirror from time to time for any evidence we are accepting isolation, alienation, or indoctrination.
I now get more useful information from substack than anywhere else but I still go outside the bubble. It's harder to listen to liberal rants but I still socialize with some and try to find valid points. I don't take what I read as gospel, e.g. I question how widespread the FEMA 'avoid Trump signs' discrimination was.
The path to breaking down their cult is engagement, empathy, and gentle debunking of their narrative. Cycle self-reflection into the mix to lead by example and at least a few TDS cultists will come back from the edge.
it's why i try so hard to go get information from the horse's mouth and to let people explain their own beliefs in their own words.
i world in which you get your information about people different from you purely as hearsay provided by people wo are just like you gets very insular, very fast.
if X's learn everyhting they know about Y's from listening to other X's, that's how you get entire fields of straw men.
Professor Jacob Needleman wrote a great book “Money and the Meaning of Life” in which he puts his students through an exercise where they debate a topic. The rebuttor of the stated position is not allowed to counter until he/she has repeated the adversary’s argument to that person’s satisfaction. Only then can he/she present the counter argument. That strategy would go a long way towards helping us actually understand each other. Not sure how well Joy Reid would do in such an environment but her reaction to the mere proposition of such might be the true revelation.
One of the hardest things in life is keeping yourself honest and not fooling yourself. I emphasized this to my children and continue to do so with my grandchildren. I remember several times when my son was a teenager that he called me on my own bullshit and was happy he could do so even though I felt a bit sheepish. Too many take themselves so seriously they lost all sense of perspective and humor, also evidently the ability to believe their own eyes
When I was in college, the late, great Philip Morison (physicist and overall renaissance man) suggested that a good rule of thumb to tell truth from untruth is to see if has what he called "the ring of truth." If something doesn't, but still seems possible--if implausible--then it's worth looking into. Sometimes weird things are right. Like relativity. But this happens pretty rarely.
That's not to say that things that pass intuitive muster are always right. In fact, they're often wrong, so testing and verifying things is valuable. As far as I know, nowhere is this truer than in medicine. Full disclosure: I'm a retired surgeon. And I still see people cling to what they've been taught in medical school as if it had been written on the tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. Even when what they've been taught is plainly wrong.
The fact is that most of what they have been taught is wrong because the allopathic paradigm of medicine has been wrong from its inception; the historical evidence for this is there for anyone willing to do the research to reveal how medical science was hijacked at least 150 years ago; there once were real scientists doing honest work and making genuine life-saving discoveries but who were vilified and discarded because their genius did not support the lies of the status-quo which only promoted treatments which could make money and control health care at our expense and not our well-being; this is why Trump and JFKjr have an enormous task and uphill battle ahead of them in taking on such an entrenched system with so many stakeholders who will resist any and all reforms.
Asking questions with genuine curiosity rather than from an adversarial presentation is a way to get people to examine their assumptions. The challenge is to relate on a level they can understand which for many is a dive into a void of ignorance that superhuman patience would be required to see them through.
"anyone who gets their news from TV or NYT is living in a parallel universe, one where the cult still reigns. [] and these outlets have an actual, vested interest in keeping their viewers from understanding or even experiencing reality."
That stunning reality alone explains so much, as does this great piece.
I suppose we should not be surprised at the lengths to which these people will go now that they've been exposed. They'll smash the mirror on offer as a result of the election and cut us all with the shards to avoid looking into it. We must be mindful.
I had a positive interaction with an old friend in this vein. I drove across the country to visit him. We went out to a bar for beer and shuffleboard and got into a discussion about abortion. He couldn't fathom that I had come around to my current viewpoint, and angrily threatened to leave me at the bar (he drove). I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was in his car waiting for me. I got in and we drove in silence. We stopped at a gas station. I told him that I loved him and would never leave him at a bar all alone. He was absolutely shocked. Since then, his attitude has softened considerably. I hope to keep up the pressure, so to speak. The poor man needs God in his life, desperately.
I am so glad that worked out, Brian. Your friend has an anger problem and God is there, always.
we all get angry. I do not get angry much. disrespect angers me.
we have.... believe it or not, waaay too much churlishness and arrogance in this massive country. This sort of behavior becomes so common, it spreads.... welll much faster than the plandemic. I can think of numerous theories of how this evolved... more and more acceptance of crappy behavior.
to add (just rolled out of bed here) abortion is such a tiny stupid dumb thing to argue about. The left can not let go. We should be getting REALLY angry about the funds cut from our military bases, that are now undesirable prison like conditions for soldiers, care of our veterans young and old. Spend all of that illegal immigrant money on creating more housing for military families and those in retirement. Nice stuff, not shit holes.
I´m sure you mean well but that statement doesn´t come across as loving to everybody. To non-Christians it can feel preachy, smug, condescending. If you really want people to have a warm, loving feeling in your presence, I wouldn´t use that phrase with "everyone."
All week, I’ve been sending screenshots of the meltdown in my Facebook feed to my sister. They’re exactly what you’re describing—“I have removed all Trump voters from my life and if you’re one of them who is still lurking, please remove your hateful self from my life and die a painful death” kind of stuff. It’s sad and scary and disturbing.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ― Mark Twain
Jonestown is no longer a compound in Guyana. It is a global digital cult that pumps in kool-aid 24/7. Those who spread cult messaging are the Sacklers of information. NPC PMC consoomers with poor information diets will deteriorate further into broken-brained BlueAnon Boomerwaffens.
We are the media now. They are the noise, we are the signal. Democracy dies in the darkness, but mockery thrives in the light!
https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/bezos-wapo-hard-truth-future-of-media
I’m reminded of this wisdom and that it’s missing.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
If individuals would develop their personal character this way, then collectively we would get along fine.
Their parents didn't bring them up to have any personal character, or any morals for that matter. They were brought up to believe only they matter in every way.
Bandit,
It’s not all nurture. Nature has its place.
I try to live my life very much in the spirit Johnny Be Real represents.
My mom and sister are way in the cult. They aren’t talking to me right now. There’s too much cognitive dissonance between what I represent (a terrifying and alienating witches brew of openly Christian, devoted wife and mother, successful business owner, highly educated Trump voter) and the daughter and sister they love who demonstrates compassion and forgiveness for them. That I’m also disabled (a highly coveted victim label they can claim sympathy for while condescending to me - a win-win) but do not let that define me other than to be grateful for the lessons it’s taught me confounds them deeply. I’m not in the victim/villain/hero construct - very confusing. Best stay away from me. I’m a giant challenge to the world view.
And I’m not big on food coloring, artificial flavors and sugar filled pitchers of liquid hate.
Emily, I have seen you make this comment, in almost totality, on other stacks. 🤔 I wonder what that means.
That I’m a political orphan and it pains me. That I related to your comment. And that I need not speak with you again.
I for one am glad to hear from you about your experience and condition. I do not spend much time on comments on stacks, so I may not have known you if you hadn't shared here as well.
Yes. Good.
Most likely that it's her core values. Sorry, Emily, of butting in. Just thought it was kind of obvious.
Thank you.
Spot on! Do I get a trophy now?
Are you still breathing? Then absolutely! As a bonus, when you pass away, the democrats will recruit you to vote.
lololololololololol 🤣
My son and his wife are leftists...and I sure didn't raise him this way. I know now when he started to break towards this insanity. Hindsight is 20/20, but it's not like he would have listened- because hormones and the head on his shoulders wasn't what was talking to him....
With lots of men, it never is. 😉
🙏🏻🙌🏼♥️
Democracy needs to die in darkness. Long live the Republic.
According to the Financial Times the only groups that moved towards the Dems were college educated women and (checks notes) boomers.
The Dems thought they "owned" the college educated women. Perhaps they do/did own the coastal elite groups of such women. But as a non-elite educated woman myself, I know rather a LOT of college educated women as well as non-college educated women who never supported Harris and who have always supported Trump....for most of them this is their third time voting for Trump. Furthermore, working women have known and worked around/for/under women who act very much like Harris. We didn't like it AND we recognized those negative personal qualities in her. When 90+% of a person's staff quit, we all know the reason why. The Dems don't seem to understand who their loyal voters are at this point. Nor did they try to find out, which is hard to do when your main focus is simply herding people into voter groups.
Well said. I didn't/don't know anyone who voted for Harris. Sadly, my friends & family - save a couple - don't want to discuss/hear/read anything political. They seem determined to remain uniformed about what's happening in that realm. It's quite vexing! 🤨
A friend of mine voted for her. She likes to portray herself as this well read woman because she reads historical fiction. Her daughter told my daughter “we voted for Kamala because she would have been the first woman!” like that was some sort of reason. Her daughter is 11.
She’s a SAHM but was an early education teacher prior. I’d love to know the degrees/professions these college educated women actually have as I would guess they fall mainly in the useless or the indoctrination degrees (ie teaching). Most intelligent women I know voted for Trump.
How about this one: My sister in law (very low information voter) admitted she voted for Harris. Her one and only reason? Harris is a woman. Sigh.
The dims have not been paying attention for a long time.
https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Democrats-Betrayed-Women-Girls/dp/B0CN32BXC2/ref=sr_1_1
Ccxn NBC v
Posted in error
testing to see if a comment is deletable😬
Snark Rules!
Jonestown was never just isolated and in one place. It's been cropping up like some bug-a-boo whack-a-mole since time immemorial. All you have to do is study herd behavior to know, this can happen to us, and maybe far easier. Get one or two skittish herd members running and you have a stampede. And it has served us well on occasion. Do you stand your ground and ask questions or do you wait for the unseen predator that has caused the stampede?
Many will bolt.
Behavior is contagious.
> the Sacklers of information
Most people aren't aware of how much systematic media and data manipulation were involved in "the Sackler method," a carefully thought out strategy used to turn family doctors into pushers for pHarma in the middle 20th century.
You can find Art Sackler in the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame (yes, there is such a thing), inducted in 1997 for being the first to sell $100m of a pharmaceutical (Valium).
https://www.mahf.com/mahf-inductees/
Forverts/Forward was pleased to offer this lengthy piece in 2017 on his proto-Big-Data good buddy LW Froelich:
https://forward.com/news/359832/the-secret-life-of-the-gay-jewish-immigrant-whose-company-sells-your-medica/
https://archive.is/d1hm6
Suffice it to say, after more than a century of this sort of mass media brainhack/fear porn, coupled with intensive, granular information control, it's not going to be easy to reclaim minds and souls. I'm not terribly hopeful, but I also haven't given up quite yet.
The Sacklers Are Jews.
Name The Jew.
Jonestown was a test run.
The people who post their meltdowns, write awful social media responses, cut off family and friends over politics seem of a type. Attention seekers whose day-to-day lives don’t provide enough “look at me, how great am I” moments, so they seek it online.
AWFLs suffering Munchausen-by-proxy with their “trans” children. Single, multi- pierced, blue haired harpies who hate men because no man would pay attention to them. Childless cat ladies who loathe their self-inflicted loneliness. Feminist adjacent “men” who think their “gurrl power support” will win them female favor.
Boring real life causes them to seek feedback online, every day. Sad.
they are signaling tribal affinity and loyalty.
they are also expecting to get special treatment because they are aggrieved and fragile.
it's a powerful combo to actually make people want to be broken.
Exactly.
It is not their responsibility to deal with the disquiet/discomfort of their existence, rather the responsibility of others to change reality to make their existence less disquieting/discomforting.
I've said before the fear of losing something is a much better motivator than the prospect of gaining something. Right now these people are willing to do anything to avoid looking "defeat" in the eye because they would have to confront the fact that their search for the "divine abode" beyond the "firmament" is grounded on "astroturf".
In a way it's more of a "religion" than a cult. I mean a delusion harbored by an individual is mental illness, by small groups a cult, but by many a religion. The difference between a cult and a religion is political power and real estate (in this case the institution are all "owned" by the same ideology). This ideology provides everything religions do: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.
Mental illness is definitely involved but i also think it's gravitational force is an over abundance of optimism in their search for some fictitious utopian future that will never exist. This is prone to exploitation because it's easy to sell a transcendent promise of something that doesn't exist to those that require having their "purpose" provided externally.
When you've "bought" that, you are not bound to the boundaries of empathy because anything/anyone who challenges that inherently challenges the ultimate sign of their fidelity to a "righteous" cause: PURITY. Given that, it is very dangerous because the most destructive of "religions" are the ones that wish to gain some ultimate "power" as a reward for tearing down and overthrowing a "morally unworthy" system. I think that's why it manifests itself individually as a patient on a mainlined drip-feed of guilt, self righteousness and intolerance.
What they've really bought is the commodity that the MSM is best at selling these days: RHETORIC. This rhetoric releases a feel-good chemical release of dopamine (literally) because it helps them interpret and remember info in a way that validates their existing belief system, while simultaneously ignoring/dismissing any information that controverts their beliefs/feelings. This allows their feelings to become not something you have, rather who you are...and in the pilgrimage to purity they not only believe they must puke out their feelings(online or otherwise) for all to see, but that it is a necessary ritual to advertise their path of purity as a acquittal for all previous "mortal sins"; a ritualistic "chanting" of sorts.
Much like a religion they have their own language, rituals, semantic "stops" and thought-terminating clichés that immediately dismiss dissent or flawed reasoning they rationalize. In this way it about the performative not informative because it goes beyond reflecting/describing who they are, rather it's creates who they are.
Some have said it's a religion/cult without a leader. I disagree,i think their "Leader" is The Almighty Algorithm that keeps them in their isolation silo by only presenting ideas/info/rhetoric that manufacture, nurture and reinforce their fanaticism, but just as importantly it keeps them from stumbling upon "adversarial" ides/POV, unless they actively search for it. And because of this their worldview is based on two sides of the same false coin. Voila, their ignorance is as good as your knowledge. BTW this only going to get worse the more sophisticated tech becomes at distilling metadata into personalized content/rhetoric because in a sense it's self-arranges in a personalized recursive function. I think this will give them a sense of "control" they may have felt alluded them previously in their lives of quiet desperation; a "personal Jesus" they manufactured of themselves. Through their personal Jesus they can become as "loud" as they want to now.
In some way they worship Trump and hang on his every word in an inverse relationship. Its like the more Trump says that conflicts with the internalized external narrative that fills the void which defines the center of gravity for their ego, the more ardent they become in their devotion to their fanaticism...because it fundamentally couldn't exist without his "words". And the media fuels this with a chameleon like arsenal of rhetoric/misinformation/diversion.
My theory is the MSM is their pope and Trump is who they worship. And since the pope is the medium by which they can commune with their anti-god, in their pursuit of purity, they must rely on the medias interpretation of the anti-gods words/behavior to chart their pilgrimage. Through this process they receive their own holy language that can only be deciphered by the pope. And because of this the first thing they're willing to change about themselves is language/ideas/speech....and, counterintuitively, it's also the LAST thing they're willingly to change because the words/language we breath literally define us.
Ultimately this is why they feel we must be silenced.
Sorry. That got wordy. Sitting on a tarmac with nothing else to do. Apologies in advance.....
Stop apologizing for writing such great comments. Just. Stop.
But keep writing.
The Librarian of Celaeno and John Carter just DMed TL/DR.
Lolol. Sorry, man.
Hard to edit when you're free styling on a cellphone.
Let it flow.
Since I haven't listened to much in the way of the MSM for decades, most of what I heard about TRUMP was secondhand news aside from catching the occasional rally unedited. Ever since podcasts, I've been downloading and getting my news through this venue since 2004. One of the major factors was I was tired of the small bites of terrestrial programming obfuscated by commercials, and being imprisoned by whatever it was terrestrial radio/cable offered.
The problem with those who seek to maintain their echo chamber through algorithm, is because many of us were forced to live that false reality, we don't want a repeat of it, and therefore are constantly seeking it out to push against it.
"Masks don't work." is my rallying cry. And along with it "There was no pandemic."
Bravo, mate.
Fly right, don't let the TSA bite...
I don't think the snowflakes hang on to Trump's every word because they mostly can't stand to hear him speak so they take the word of the MSM that, "Trump said (insert any Leftist lie here)". That is why they actually do beleive Trump called for a real "bloodbath" and said whats-her-face, the RINO ought to be shot, the Russian hoax, not Hunter's laptop lies, etc.
Read my comment again
In a sense we have all taken swigs off of the "fictitious utopian future that will never exist" bottle over the years.
"There ought to be a law...."
"In a country as rich as ours we should never...."
"why don't they take that money they gave illegals and give it to......"
All in the same line of thinking the Uncle Federal is that rich benevolent uncle that will take care of us.
This is why we have a system where Trump and his team have literally FOUR THOUSAND political appointments to make. And so many laws on the books that we are all probably lawbreakers at some point in our lives, and thus vulnerable to the enforcers. THAT is not freedom.
Could not agree more.
The more laws of the state, the more corrupt the state.
I believe Tacitus said something like that.
Its true.
Best explanation yet.
In the old days we’d say they have a victim mentality and a persecution complex.
All of them future ‘Grievance Studies’ students.
In the old days they'd be told to grow up and fuck off.
Ironically, they have no problem telling those who disagree with them to shut the f up and get a life.
In my day, it'd just be 'grow up'.
Yes...and "why don't you just cry about it"....
Hahaha - and if it was a parent or grandparent saying it that would be followed by "or I'll GIVE you something to cry about!"
They are most certainly broken. Check out Karen’s responses. 🤦🏻♂️
CATlantic City
Yes the victim as victor is what has driven me the most crazy for the last ~15 years. Seems to have gained a lot of steam during the Barack "you didn't build that" Obama years, and then just kept on rolling.
How about the Dems and their "we're fighting for our freedom" BS? I don't think leftists can get more delusional than they already are, but I reserve the right to be wrong because I never thought they could get as stupid as they are now.
I am pushing 60, so may not live long enough to see how the history books treat this era. All of these technological advances, information in our pocket that would have required a massive library 50 years ago, and so on., And yet the culture pushes gender change, says there can be pregnant men and decries things like micro-aggressions and asks for safe spaces.
When you put it like that - which is pretty much the brass tacks of it - it makes one wonder - will they ever pull out of it? And, if not, how does this influence others in their orbit - children, spouse, friends, etc.?
Misery loves company
I must say that the women that I have see on X who declare that 'I won't let a man come near my body' are the women that no man - possibly no woman - would WANT to come near. 😳
Lacking self-awareness is endemic among them
Uh, we're on here seeking feedback every day or so. What does that make us? My real life is definitely not boring. Strange as it may sound, I actually read and reply to blogs as a way to relax from a high stress job.
Substack isn’t exactly X or FB or IG or TikTok. It takes time to read many of the articles here, a modicum of intelligence to understand the points being made, and then respond thoughtfully. Those other social media sites are filled with liberal screaming, both figuratively and literally. Kinda like Karen did on this string.
Irony Jersey, irony.
🎯
🤦🏻♂️ Sometimes I am way too literal minded…
Not sure what you mean by 'What does that make us'?
Just we need to be careful we are not pots call those kettles black.
Totally agree.
Yowza that second paragraph reads like my family album. Except me. I’m literally not in any of the pictures.
And wow...the projection. This past week on twitter I ave been interacting with someone who thinks you living life normally not wearing a mask is tentamount to being a "pac man" of aerosolized SARS infected fecal matter. Because I stated "masks don't work." He thinks I am the fragile one, "coping" in fear and panic and by way of dealing with it is denying its existence. Yes, that takes some mental gymnastics.
They fret about micrograms of aerosolized poisons while binging kilograms of metabolic poisons, and the more it makes them inflamed and obese, the more they call it beauty.
Once again, Projection rears its ugly head.
Hear me out: What if we DON’T try to fix them - and feature them instead?
What we see as politics is usually a contest of status. The left’s success, and most of its efforts, were about coding leftism as high status. In contrast, the seething, doubling down on unpopular insistences, and public tantrums are very, very low status behavior.
The more focus we put on this, and the more they help us define this picture as The Left, the faster we code leftism as low status (and very unmanly). And win.
Speaking of darker, as a substantial minority become more visibly deranged and threatening, it becomes easier to gain support for brutal solutions to said threat. I don’t want that, though; they’re too useful.
Wow! You're just betting better & better as this was simply brilliant! Honestly, my subscription to you is some of the best $ I spend all year. What did Erasmus say? When I get money, I subscribe to El Gato Malo, and if there's any left, I buy food.
Not sure about Erasmus but I agree with you about 'simply brilliant' & 'best investment for my money.'
Mental illness is progressively degenerative if not treated, and those who suffer from it can be fairly easily manipulated by people cynical and evil enough to do it. The manipulation is also degenerative, getting worse over time and quite dangerous if frustrated. But don't take my word for it. Just look around and listen. Difficult to miss it. Trump has a seriously difficult future ahead of him, but I, for one, intend to do whatever I can to Make America Great Again. Fun is where you find it.
Like!
What are the most effective movements of this type in history, how did they proliferate, and what did, or could have, stopped them?
Bolsheviks, Maoists, Nazis, at times the church. I think amplification with ridicule of the obscenity of this behavior is important (if your girl is on tiktok talking about poisoning you, get out but also don’t ignore it; there should be some real consequences, just as there should have been after Kathy Griffin’s beheading stunt.
But also, and more importantly, the message that most people are NOT like this needs to proliferate. Don’t just share the crazies. Share the normals. Do business with people who don’t hate you, and don’t do business with those who do.
The isolation and silencing was effective during covid. We, the dissidents and disapprovers, were the majority, much, if not all, of the time. But they made it hard for us to find each other.
Thankfully we had Substack, specifically Coffee and Covid.
My mental health improved significantly with knowing that we are a smart, savvy, funny large group.
Is Coffee and Covid a substack?
Coffee and Covid is a must read every day! You will love it!
I do!
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/
YES! My daily addiction of optimism and snark.
Oooh, sounds perfect.
Yes and a must read!!
ah, just found it.
Covfefe?
@Dr. Linda- ty for the info! I just signe up because it sounds like my cup of t... coffee!!!
Thanks, I especially love 'Sarcastically Optimistic Commentary' which is why I'm a subscriber to EGM.
Luckily, I haven't run into anyone w TDS. But - behavior IS contagious - so my personal philosophy is to treat others as kindly as would like them to treat me & hope for the best.
Read about the Glorious Revolution - 1688.
Anyone else notice all of the Robert Reich types only allow paid subscribers to comment on their Substack posts. Thank you Gato for allowing an open forum.
Just in general, I appreciate it when substack authors let people comment freely. On a few occasions I´ve liked what a substacker wrote and wanted to say something complementary but was blocked by the Paid Subscribers Only thing.
This is a feature, not a bug. Pay the price and criticize Reich. What better use of $50 do you have?
Elon Musk genuinely seeks to preserve humanity. He thought he would do so by colonizing Mars. But at some point he realized that before he could do that, he would first have to preserve truth itself, so he bought Twitter. And it changed history by breaking the authoritarian stranglehold on media.
I'm reading his biography right now - the one by Walter Iscaason - he is a fascinating man in so many ways.
Here's one of their cultists now!:
"Melissa Pxxxxx
2 hours ago
A "grab 'em'", "I could shoot somebody on 5th Ave.", twice-impeached, 91 indictments receiving, sociopathic narcissist who is still garnering enough support in the polls to be the likely "Republican" candidate is proof enough that we just can't trust voters all the time to come to the right decision."
After Trump's win, she also ranted that he won because the "price of bacon has increased.
But wait, there's more!:
""Melissa Pxxxxx
6 hours ago
Everybody deserves to vote, but they're not entitled to choose to thoughtlessly burn the country down with that vote."
This is the cultist that you so aptly describe, and she lives among us...
While EGM made a terrific case as to WHY these 'cultists' rage, it still baffles me as to the amount and the quality of it.
HAPPY VETERANS DAY Fellow Vets.
As a Boomer XX Female, I do not like the view. I never liked the view, I cringe when I heard anything from the view.
The good news is these are probably heavily vaxxed viewers. They are going to have serious health issues.
It is no one’s business who I voted for. My Grandparents are probably rolling on their graves because people keep babbling who they voted for. It is nobody’s business.
“It is no one’s business who I voted for.“
Yes! Growing up, I was taught that you don’t ask people about their politics, their finances, Health, sex life or faith. it was considered the height of rudeness. One of the things I objected to during the covid times, was the audacity of strangers or even acquaintances demanding to know whether or not I was vaccinated. I wanted to respond to them, that they first need to tell me details of their last colonoscopy.
Try, "when was the last time you masturbated?" Or "when was the last time you gave someone a BJ?" They shut up and scurry off real quick.
Reminds me of what I saw on X yesterday:
Pssst.
I was at the Barnes & Noble the other day & asked the clerk if they had the new Donald Trump book on How to Deport Illegal Immigrants.
She looked at me and said, 'get the fuck out of here'.
I said, 'Yes, that's the one. Do you have it in paperback?' 🤣
🤣🤣
🤣🤣🤣Hilarious!
😂😂😂😂😂😂
There was a time when grace and manners and responsibility mattered. I hope we can see a return of that.
Couldn’t have said it better
Now it seems like these are the only topics some people CAN talk about. You try to maintain a neutral conversation but these subjects always seem to slide back in.
same
Happy Veterans Day to you too!!
Thank you for serving our country!
"The good news is these are probably heavily vaxxed viewers. They are going to have serious health issues."
Yes, that remains the elephant in the room, doesn't it? At some point, the problem of the fracture may become self limiting in a sense as these cultists are all vaxxed to the hilt and are going to begin suffering major health problems because of it -- if they haven't already, because MAN do people look sick out there. This, in turn, is going to create another major problem for the world, because there are not enough doctors who did not take the vaxx to actually treat the ever-growing legions of seriously sick people.
Might get kinda ugly out there for awhile.
The view has always been awful. Even when I probably agreed with the majority of them on some issues, it was unwatchable. Something a torturer would play on a loop to gain a confession
Brilliant as always.
"the view viewers are home all day drinking this in"...among other things.
It's almost as if these deranged harridans *want* to conform to stereotypes about female hysteria and instability but are either too cynical or too stupid to realize what they're doing, I can't decide which. Incidentally I have this picture in my head of Joy Reid taking out her earpiece once the cameras are off, laughing and saying, "can you believe people eat this shit up? Where's my bourbon and Beethoven? How are my defence company stocks doing today?" What I *can* be certain of is that this is the end result of decades of the feminization of education and media infiltration; I mean not even the most anti-Nixon or Reagan male network news anchor of those eras would have indulged in this psychotic nonsense in 1972 or 1984. Howard Beale was satire for a reason.
I mentioned somewhere else that we would see a lot of "micro Jonestowns" and that's exactly what's happening.
they value consensus uber alles.
i suspect joy reid really believes what she peddles. in her world, it's gospel truth because in her mental map, consensus means truth. i don't think she can distinguish between the two nor even wants to.
Honestly, I would have more respect for her if she was an amoral opportunist who didn't believe a word she utters. This is far scarier and depressing.
agreed.
these are mostly not grifters anymore, they are the true believers that supplant the grifters but do not know the grift is a grift.
it's why they do so much damage. they really think their plans are going to work and do not know enough not to press the clearly marked "end of the world button."
I think the phenomena has always existed, but it has not been as organized, or incentivized as well as it is now. The hive mind of the Third Reich relied on male violence for power, but this hive mindedness seems to rely on female perpetual victimhood. It is suicidal aggression where they make you watch their self destruction. No thank you, TikTok.
It’s an obsession with the evil “patriarchy” of the white Eurocentrists. Egalitarian ideals opened the doors and shattered the ceilings for XX and now they want to complain about the architecture. I see it with my educated, advocating Gen Z nieces who think themselves erudite but have no idea how the Federal Reserve works.
CS Lewis's quote is particularly apt here: Joy is an omnipotent moral busybody, not a robber baron.
"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."
in a nut shell, it is called brain damage.
I am pretty sure it is a hell of a pit to climb out of.
For Joy, she would have to admit everything she believes is wrong. What would remain? She would rather remain sitting on her "end of the world" button.
I think you're right. Reid has a nasty level of viciousness that doesn't seem faked.
Turn off the fricking news, avoid all social media news, boycott the MSM and then take a look around you, pay attention and make your own choices and determinations. You just might find that 99% of the news is worthless, unnecessary and to be avoided like the plague it is...even if the new Trump era, if that ever occurs.
Do not trust any MSM news, ever. It will continue to be and always has been nothing but a force for indoctrination and disruption because most people are psychologically asleep and need their fix of others telling them how to think.
That's why they hate Elon with the flames of a billion burning suns. What he did acquiring X and allowing more free speech is intolerable to them. I hope he has REALLY good security! Actually anyone associated with the new administration! I think we're going to get many more would be but hopefully unsuccessful assassins!
They lost total CONTROL. oops
Absolutely and why it’s called “programs” lol
My personality and training in philosophy & mathematics leads me to follow a chain of thought to the end ... then start over from a different perspective and see where that leads.
So while I fully agree with bad cat and most of the comments ... a word of caution. We should look in the mirror from time to time for any evidence we are accepting isolation, alienation, or indoctrination.
I now get more useful information from substack than anywhere else but I still go outside the bubble. It's harder to listen to liberal rants but I still socialize with some and try to find valid points. I don't take what I read as gospel, e.g. I question how widespread the FEMA 'avoid Trump signs' discrimination was.
The path to breaking down their cult is engagement, empathy, and gentle debunking of their narrative. Cycle self-reflection into the mix to lead by example and at least a few TDS cultists will come back from the edge.
this is an important point.
it's why i try so hard to go get information from the horse's mouth and to let people explain their own beliefs in their own words.
i world in which you get your information about people different from you purely as hearsay provided by people wo are just like you gets very insular, very fast.
if X's learn everyhting they know about Y's from listening to other X's, that's how you get entire fields of straw men.
Professor Jacob Needleman wrote a great book “Money and the Meaning of Life” in which he puts his students through an exercise where they debate a topic. The rebuttor of the stated position is not allowed to counter until he/she has repeated the adversary’s argument to that person’s satisfaction. Only then can he/she present the counter argument. That strategy would go a long way towards helping us actually understand each other. Not sure how well Joy Reid would do in such an environment but her reaction to the mere proposition of such might be the true revelation.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/185521.Money_and_the_Meaning_of_Life
One of the hardest things in life is keeping yourself honest and not fooling yourself. I emphasized this to my children and continue to do so with my grandchildren. I remember several times when my son was a teenager that he called me on my own bullshit and was happy he could do so even though I felt a bit sheepish. Too many take themselves so seriously they lost all sense of perspective and humor, also evidently the ability to believe their own eyes
When I was in college, the late, great Philip Morison (physicist and overall renaissance man) suggested that a good rule of thumb to tell truth from untruth is to see if has what he called "the ring of truth." If something doesn't, but still seems possible--if implausible--then it's worth looking into. Sometimes weird things are right. Like relativity. But this happens pretty rarely.
That's not to say that things that pass intuitive muster are always right. In fact, they're often wrong, so testing and verifying things is valuable. As far as I know, nowhere is this truer than in medicine. Full disclosure: I'm a retired surgeon. And I still see people cling to what they've been taught in medical school as if it had been written on the tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. Even when what they've been taught is plainly wrong.
It's depressing.
The fact is that most of what they have been taught is wrong because the allopathic paradigm of medicine has been wrong from its inception; the historical evidence for this is there for anyone willing to do the research to reveal how medical science was hijacked at least 150 years ago; there once were real scientists doing honest work and making genuine life-saving discoveries but who were vilified and discarded because their genius did not support the lies of the status-quo which only promoted treatments which could make money and control health care at our expense and not our well-being; this is why Trump and JFKjr have an enormous task and uphill battle ahead of them in taking on such an entrenched system with so many stakeholders who will resist any and all reforms.
Wait! Doc, are you saying relativity happens pretty rarely?! Are you positing a new theorem on relativity? Lol. Ps I agree with you comment.
Asking questions with genuine curiosity rather than from an adversarial presentation is a way to get people to examine their assumptions. The challenge is to relate on a level they can understand which for many is a dive into a void of ignorance that superhuman patience would be required to see them through.
"anyone who gets their news from TV or NYT is living in a parallel universe, one where the cult still reigns. [] and these outlets have an actual, vested interest in keeping their viewers from understanding or even experiencing reality."
That stunning reality alone explains so much, as does this great piece.
I suppose we should not be surprised at the lengths to which these people will go now that they've been exposed. They'll smash the mirror on offer as a result of the election and cut us all with the shards to avoid looking into it. We must be mindful.
This past year I started just saying "Jesus loves you" to everyone I came in contact with. We can love them out of their misery. Really, we can.
Or how about "I love you"
I try very hard not to trigger the weak
I had a positive interaction with an old friend in this vein. I drove across the country to visit him. We went out to a bar for beer and shuffleboard and got into a discussion about abortion. He couldn't fathom that I had come around to my current viewpoint, and angrily threatened to leave me at the bar (he drove). I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was in his car waiting for me. I got in and we drove in silence. We stopped at a gas station. I told him that I loved him and would never leave him at a bar all alone. He was absolutely shocked. Since then, his attitude has softened considerably. I hope to keep up the pressure, so to speak. The poor man needs God in his life, desperately.
I am so glad that worked out, Brian. Your friend has an anger problem and God is there, always.
we all get angry. I do not get angry much. disrespect angers me.
we have.... believe it or not, waaay too much churlishness and arrogance in this massive country. This sort of behavior becomes so common, it spreads.... welll much faster than the plandemic. I can think of numerous theories of how this evolved... more and more acceptance of crappy behavior.
to add (just rolled out of bed here) abortion is such a tiny stupid dumb thing to argue about. The left can not let go. We should be getting REALLY angry about the funds cut from our military bases, that are now undesirable prison like conditions for soldiers, care of our veterans young and old. Spend all of that illegal immigrant money on creating more housing for military families and those in retirement. Nice stuff, not shit holes.
I´m sure you mean well but that statement doesn´t come across as loving to everybody. To non-Christians it can feel preachy, smug, condescending. If you really want people to have a warm, loving feeling in your presence, I wouldn´t use that phrase with "everyone."
All week, I’ve been sending screenshots of the meltdown in my Facebook feed to my sister. They’re exactly what you’re describing—“I have removed all Trump voters from my life and if you’re one of them who is still lurking, please remove your hateful self from my life and die a painful death” kind of stuff. It’s sad and scary and disturbing.
I had an interaction with an old high school friend last week. He posted that he was sad.
I reached out and asked what was wrong.
Well,you can guess. He was complaining about Trump winning.
I told him I vote for the Constitution. He then said Trump was racist and misogynistic.
I asked for references. The only thing he could provide was the incorrect statement that Trump was found guilty of rape. I alerted him to the truth.
Crickets now.
We can only keep trying. I keep a folder of fact references on my phone for quick access. Every so often I get someone to actually read them.
Post them. Good idea.
Yes! If you can, please post them!
Cognitive Dissonance should be added to the DSM-5. This post is so true and watching it play out is, frankly, fearsome. Thank you, gato.