246 Comments

The principle should really be stated as thus :

"I will defend to the death your right to be a complete tit"

The thing that many seem to be missing is that yesterday's "complete tit" is tomorrow's Gallimeow

The other thing that is not emphasised nearly enough is that it's not **just** about the right to speak - it is also about the right to LISTEN.

Do I not have the right to hear contrary opinion? Who gets to decide what I can, and can't, read or watch?

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And the right to apply one’s critical thinking skills to draw one’s own conclusions...

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Exactly right, the main fear of the censor is not that someone will utter the dreadful truth but that many will hear that truth and know it to be true and then they too will know and speak the truth.

Their aim is to silence the whistle-blower that blows the whistle on them, even while claiming to protect whistle blowers by law the contradictions just keep piling up.

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Or tomorrow’s Copurrrnipus....and yes why should anyone be in a position to decide what we read or watch or eat or drink or speak or whatever! It’s so oppressive.

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👍🏽

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Amen!

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Is it just me, or does Harvard take in all the losers?

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🗨 Ivy League used to mean something. Nowadays it means nothing more than an overpriced, leading indoctrination institution that spearheads victimization through woke activism and demoralization via neo-Marxist propaganda, all of which serves to divide and conquer the people.

(h/t Meredith Miller)

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Those who are most heavily divided and conquered are the students at these centers, far too many of which end up working for the government. And since most of them are reasonably intelligent, they know, even if only subliminally, that their support of censorship is, even in their world of relativism, WRONG. The constant cognitive dissonance increases the intensity of the effects of their personality disorders and other serious mental problems, and their lives and the lives of those their actions fall upon go swirling in an ever contracting spiral right down the proverbial Global Toilet. Meowdios, gatitos!

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🗨 Our world is angrily cluttered with vapid slogans shouted by the feudal factions of the talentless who, at a deep level, know they don’t fit into an advanced society: they have nothing to offer except protracted revenge for those who outpace them in each milestone of adulthood.

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They indoctrinate hard!

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It's like the "book deal" payoff for fealty to the cult. Just look at some of the luminaries taken in; David Hogg, Brian Stelter, "that woman" from New Zealand and, the beat goes on.

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if we're talking about book deals, payoffs and Harvard (that is, golden parachutes for insiders who are rewarded for not just always being wrong but being wrong in all the right ways) let's not forget the great American leaders Bill DeBlasio and Lori Lightfoot, who will both be "teaching" there this fall.

this is another one of the many reasons it pays to place tribal loyalty above anything like competence, honesty, etc: if you remain a loyal member of the club, you can only fail upwards!

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So true and well said.

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Thanks!

That these 2 blatant frauds with ZERO accomplishments to their names, both with a magical reverse-Midas Touch that left their hometowns much worse off than before their stewardship, were awarded with sinecures at our supposed most prestigious institution of higher learning says more about American corruption, mendacity and stupidity than could 1000 op-eds.

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And in addition, Harvard, one of the major braintrust institutions of higher learning, so smart that it still requires the useless and dangerous vax and is still pushing boosters. For the student and faculty safety…..And never mind the soul crushing debt most students will have when they graduate. But yes, they can wear their “Harvard educated” label on their clothes, like Laverne from “Laverne & Shirley” did with her big L on everything. The graduates will graduate with full evidence of compliance to group think, wokeness, and a smug sense of elitist superiority.

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schlemiel schlemmozzle!

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Perhaps so many of Harvard's future alumnus will become disabled or Death Vaxxed they will not create enough revenue to continue as an institution. Problem solved.

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schlemiel schlemozzle!

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Visiting Princeton next Wed with Mrs. Pi and Stepson. He's a very good student and super smart, like, freaky math genius smart, so I think he has a shot.

I can't talk them out of it. *sigh*

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With apologies, Mr. Stepson, then, cannot be so "super smart."

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He is. Brainwashing is a different thing.

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Paraphrase from Cyrano

'...seeing the ivy league, making friends, everywhere, as a dog makes friends; I mark the manor of these canine courtesies, and think, 'here comes, thank heaven , another enemy'...'

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Ivy League schools are a joke. I would never interview much less hire a graduate from Harvard. I know without meeting the person what he is like, especially in terms of attitudes and politics. No thank you.

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Quite a list myself and it starts well below Harvard.

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Harvard is full of Head Girls.

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They seem to be on a roll

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"you cannot settle science before the debate occurs"

They're not doing science. They're doing The Science. *genuflects*

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Once again, agree

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founding

Minor correction: The Science™

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*chef's kiss* perfect!

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"they are seeking power."

Sorry for big reply but relevant:

---

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against – then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures.

*We’re after power and we mean it.*

You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

- from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

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I'll admit to flipping pages at a time during some of the longest diatribes,but Atlas Shugged should be read by any sensible being.

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She sure knew how to make a slimy villian.

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/the-fountainhead/ellsworth-toohey

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Yes! Slimey and yet such an exemplar of an entire gallery of the population!

Outstanding find, Pi.

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Why, thank you kindly.

*tips tin foil fedora in Integrity and Karma's general direction*

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* leans fwd...because the urge to bat at the shiny chapeau is almost overwhelming *

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🤣

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I would argue that our modern real word villains, like the Biden clan, make Rand's fictional Toohey look like a piker. After all, Toohey did NOT, in spite of his undoubtedly evil persona, manage to live, and live very well, off the public purse for half a century. Nor did he single handedly work for years to destroy the credibility of a once great nation on the world stage. Or 'sell out' his country to foreign interests - to further enrich his clan.

Toohey, painted by Rand as a simple two dimensional villain, was in no way as evil as the Bidens. Nor could he have been. That degree of perfidy would have been unbelievable - In 1957.

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Did I miss Toohey being fingered as worst? I might have...because I'm racing through things.

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Toohey is from a different Rand novel, The Fountainhead. But many of the same themes arise.

If you're looking for a really bad guy in Atlas Shrugged, I'd say that Dr. Robert Stadler ended up being the most evil of all.

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Ms. Rand and Orwell told us this years ago and now in full fruition.

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And Huxley and others. Who is John Galt?

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$

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Wow I think I was conditioned not to want to read that book but now you have me intrigued....

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Progressive neo-Marxists hate Ayn Rand more than anyone else. The letter from Ludwig von Mises to her best explains why -

Jan 23, 1958

Dear Mrs. Rand:

I AM NOT A professional critic and I feel no call to judge the merits of a novel. So I do not want to detain you with the information that I enjoyed very much reading Atlas Shrugged and that I am full of admiration for your masterful construction of the plot.

But “Atlas Shrugged” is not merely a novel. It is also—or may I say: first of all—a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies

adopted by governments and political parties. It is a devastating exposure of the “moral cannibals,” the “gigolos of science” and of the “academic prattle” of the makers of the “anti-industrial revolution.” You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told

them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State. I warmly congratulate you and I am looking forward with great expectations to your future work.

Sincerely,

Ludwig Mises

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Good enough for von Mises good enough for me.

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Thank you for this….having been a great admirer of hers since the’70’s I was unaware of Ludwig’s letter…. And found it absolutely purrrrfect! Again—thank you.

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And to add to what Pi Guy has said, her non-fiction is way, WAY better, more cogent, concise and incisive, but you'll never hear a word about ay of that because no one would want to debate her on those terms lest they Get REKT. So they scream about Atlas Shrugged, rather than even discussing essays like "Philosophy - Who Needs It?"

I know she was wrong about God, but she got a whole lot right about the affairs of men in government, economics, culture, etc.

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She's more a philosopher, a culture critic, and an economist than a novelist so sometimes it's a bit thick. But the ideas she fleshes out can't fit on a bumper sticker.

The best quote in the book, for My Money (pun totally intended), is too long to post here but here's the audio book clip of the epic "Francisco D'Anconia's Money Speech."

It explains what Money Really Is (or at least until The Nixen Admin took us off the Gold Standard; Gold figures prominently in AS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzKs4L_XrNU

Again, it's really long, 21 minutes, but just listen to it. If you get hooked, it's pretty deep.

And unapologetically Moral.

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Perhaps this explains the laws Trump purportedly broke. If they were laws at all--since they cannot be objectively interpreted.

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It's the same for all of us

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I love cats and am owned by a particularly bad one. But YOU, possess my favorite senses of:

Humor

Irony

Common

Wonder

Optimism

Tomfoolery

Cattiness

And I am grateful for your gifts that you share.

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Re the McCullough comment--it has been my casual observation that the 3rd shot hit people a lot worse than the first 2 in terms of both short-term AE as well as long-term adverse health effects. I had assumed it was something about the cumulative effect of multiple shots. But if I'm right about that, could the change in the manufacturing process have contributed to a discrete step-up in the rate and seriousness of AE's?

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And I have been of this opinion for a long time now - my friend always chimes in with: “but speech should never be without consequences” and I think yes, speech will always have consequences and that’s fine as long as those consequences do not infringe on the ability to continue to speak.

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Speech has *natural* consequence. We don't need to impose.

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Omerta: “Nice free speech platform you got there, would be a shame if something happened to it". Substack Reads has featured several pro censorship people like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Taylor Lorenz. Might be a shakedown to avoid negative MSM coverage.

Memes have always been the lingua franca of the free. The Tiananmen Square protestors used a mimeograph machine: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-visit-the-tiananmen-square-museum-nyc

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Taylor Lorenz is still around? I thought perhaps all of her trauma intellectually disabled her.

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Intellectual disability never slowed her down before...

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Good point, silly me

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😂🤣😂... its funny,because it's true.

*wipes eyes*

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She has enormous appeal to the similarly intellectually disabled masses who follow her.

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Yeah Substack been throwing Taylor Lorenz at me too. WTF?

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> they fear our memes because they know that this is the revenge of the shape rotators and that they cannot compete with the informational density of memetic communication

You've been talking like this for years and I always just sort of quietly laughed it off. Someone who loves cat memes says memes are more than just amusing images with a less-than-a-tweet sized bit of text on top. Of course. Lol. Whatever.

Seeing the White House so clearly whip itself into apoplectic rage, so clearly violate the 1A, and to levy such ridiculously abusive levels of firepower because OF MEMES has completely changed my mind on this topic. It's just so trivial, so pathetic, so utterly deserving of the intellectual pygmies that dominate politics and science. They don't seem to give a shit about intelligent essays on Substack that probe the details of public health data, but a crude picture of a famous actor with a casual prediction on it makes them this mad? We live in an absurd era.

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author

high density ridicule is basically impossible to fight against. the memes make them look stupid and this makes them strident and defensive which just makes it worse.

they are starting to lose this fight. and they know it.

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"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad."

- "The Masque of Pandora" "(1875), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. W.

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Thank you for being willing to reassess and change your mind.

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I like that characterization you used...."intellectual pygmies". Perfect.

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Honest question. What more can we do to stand up to this ?

I'm not quiet about any of this stuff. This is my Hill. I post about vaccines and mandates on social media that lose me friends. I'm vocal and have the studies and knowledge to back it up . But I don't think it's having any effect. Trudeau is still in power, most people still think vaccines are amazing wonders (and that I'm the crazy anti science one), and the Canadian justice system has not been kind to people who step out of line.

I don't see any more levers that I can personally pull. What else is a gal to do?

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It’s having an effect.

They’re a minority with a megaphone.

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It's the same here in the US. Everyone is still stuck on the "exposing the truth" phase. And many of our "team reality" friends are strutting around with their chest puffed out saying "we were right and you were wrong and na nana na na nahhhhhhhhhhhh!" Too many people think blabbering on the internet counts as actually doing something.

No one is talking about how to put the brakes on and preventing anything like the covid circus from happening.

It's getting more and more difficult for me to have any sympathy for either side.

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Yes exactly. How do we stop this train, cause it's still steaming ahead here in Canada. New bills have passed to crack down on 'misinformation' and restrict content. We are definitely not winning.

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founding

You have a lot of supporters here in the US. Tucker Carlson covered the Canadian trucker protest and the law enforcement crackdowns on the non-followers, and had Rebel News reporters as guests on his show before Fox forced him out. I hope he will continue his coverage. Many of us had a glimpse of what's happening in Canada and we have not forgotten.

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One person at a time. People go mad in groups and regain their sanity one at a time (from Madness of the Crowds, I think). Just remember: integrity. You have it; they do not.

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Honest answer: the answer is that which cannot be written in a public (or even private) forum.

In America it was once written, "...but when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations...". That is a timeless maxim.

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Heresy is a very old, very potent concept.

You ever have an attack of vertigo while stepping off a curb? You feel like you're just about to fall a long, long way and the jolt of your foot touching solid ground a lot sooner than you expect wakes you up fast.

They want us in permanent mental vertigo because any moment, we might discover the lay of the land.

Within the space of a week two people whose intelligence I respect have expressed their distress about the world burning up around us. And I have to phrase my responses real, real carefully. Once they think you're a nut case they ain't gonna listen to anything further.

These are rough times. But I got myself a nice new epigraph and I intend to share it widely.

*There's no "modern." There's just "now." And in all times and places, samizdat by every possible name has always been the weapon that vanquishes the anesthetizing mist they try to spray on us.

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Aug 1, 2023·edited Aug 1, 2023

🗨 To the Cult of Vaccine, data does not matter; thinking creates reality, and so everyone must get with the program or we’ll all die.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I love how easily everyone forgets we're all gonna die no matter what we do.

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Hard to not recall the perpetually miserable master of [filmed] words 😇:

🗨 I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

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I find that mind boggling. Unless they intend on living forever.

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The Last Will and Testament of Pi:

"I, Pi, being of sound mind and body, leave nothing for anyone because I refuse to die. Oh, well, and that whole 'not having stuff to give anyone' thing. Yeah. That too."

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Thank you

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We are all going to die sure but will taking a vax if its not killed you, ruin your fertility? It’s not about you or me specifically, it’s also about humanity moving forward. There are many bad things (potentially) about this vax, death is just one of them.

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Aug 1, 2023·edited Aug 1, 2023

Sure! 🙂 Rhetorical exaggeration for effect is not to be taken in narrow literal sense 😏

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"Late in the Pfizer trials, the company switched to fast, mass production method using E.Coli..."

We already knew the "vaccine" was shit. Now we know that it was actually /made/ of shit.

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I wish I had saved the meme I made of an exploding Ford Pinto with a Facebook assurance that the cars had undergone rigorous safety testing and were being monitored by the most intensive safety surveillance system in history.

If someone here feels like recreating it, please do, and send me a link to it.

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You could do a 737Max in a nosedive with the same caption.

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My first car was a '72 pea green Ford Pinto with a white vinyl hard top.

#Stylin

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Lol. Mine was a powder blue 1976 Chevette.

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The tux for my Junior Prom was powder blue.

And you thought I was Stylin' with the Pinto?!

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Did the shirt have ruffles? Was the cummerbund velvet?

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Yes, ruffles. And I was going to even add "Cummerbund not vest" to my description. Should've, apparently.

And great hair. *head swish*

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😂😂😂😂😂

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"Shudder". So glad now my husband utterly refused to wear bell-bottoms 1974

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I checked and made sure that bullshit Pew poll was the same one, before replying. First, we should all know by now that polling is in itself disinformation, manipulated and skewed to generate propaganda. They are also used to support manipulated election results.

This particular poll asks their cultured respondents...Pew has a group they use repeatedly for their various questionings...if they like false information. Well I don’t like false information either. But who does one trust to determine what is false, so it can be censored??

Then, the poll carefully skirts use of the word “speech.” Think about that. Would the replies have been the same, if it wasn’t cast as “limiting free information” but “limiting free speech?”

This is a good piece, except that they have you, at least in some way, believing their horseshit.

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My daughter does the odd poll and has been getting more and more annoyed at the leading questions and manipulative phrasing they use. Sometimes I'm sure the poll itself is being used as a mechanism of change, rather than simply for data-gathering. I also wonder if people even notice, my daughter is homeschooled and has been trained to look out for the manipulative arts but maybe most other people are oblivious, I don't know...

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I, too, want to believe that poll is skewed by the sampling subjects as most who take those polls are young college educated liberals or so they say. If not, then we are, as you say, lost.

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