patrick.net

One of the things I hate about the media is how good it is at priming people to have a specific filter and then continually selectively feeding people only information that affirms that filter. I think my dislike of this comes not from the media’s behavior but the fact that so many people continuously fall prey to it, even when they are fully aware of it being done to them previously.

Three of the most noteworthy recent examples we have seen of this priming were:

•Trump is Hitler.

•The sky is falling (because of COVID-19).

•The COVID-19 vaccines are 100% safe, 95% effective, and essential for returning to normal.

Although none of these were objectively true, because of how effectively the media primed much of the population’s RAS, many were left with a deep conviction these filters were true and that the evidence for it was so overwhelming anyone who could not “see” it was unforgivable. This, in turn, led to something I had not seen before with the American propaganda apparatus—families and long-term friendships were broken apart simply due to people having divergent viewpoints on these issues and not ascribing to the media’s narrative.

Note: One of the things I found the most surprising was just how effective this propaganda push was. The best example I can think of is how most medical professionals I met fell for all three. For instance, as James Miller (the honest doc I covered here) has highlighted in a national television interview after that article was published, many doctors and government leaders who directed the COVID-19 response established many of their beliefs on these narratives based on what CNN told them rather than reviewing the medical evidence themselves.

Greg_In_Oz

The problem with society today is that “I told you so” is incredibly triggering to all of the die hards and double-boosted, even the ones who have realised they were lied to ... I recall back in ~October 2021 just before WA started mandating the jabs for practically everybody pointing out the chicanery in the so-called “pandemic of the unvaccinated” statistics in literal black-and-white to work colleagues, who would stare at the evidence of the obvious lie in front of their faces and then choose to ignore it. Data from the UK, NSW, several US localities, the TGA, ATAGI, literally none of it moved the needle at all such was the spell cast over 98% of the population ... the only thing that seemed to matter was rigid adherence to the narrative and conformity to the ideal of being seen to be “responsible, kind and intelligent” by trusting “authoritative” sources. To this day I can’t take any of them seriously anymore, they failed the ultimate test.

... progressivism is besotted with the transformational future, an imaginary utopia qualitatively different from and superior to the Tartarus of antiquity in every way – an Elysium of peace, stability, equality, wealth, ease, comfort, and bliss, existing in a perpetual state of liberatory ecstasy in which the war, chaos, poverty, strife, suffering, and misery of the past have been permanently eradicated.

As a thing imagined, it can be imagined to be as perfect as one likes. This means politics grounded in an imagined future can be as morally grandiose as one likes, with whatever moral urgency goes with such imaginings.

This is deeply intoxicating.

Grounding one’s politics in an imagined future also provides huge rhetorical advantages, precisely because said future is as perfect as one wants it to be. Anyone who wishes to defend some actually existing thing has the problem that it will be the product of trade-offs and human failings.

An “imagined future” believer, by contrast, can just wish all that away for political purposes while hanging current imperfections on those who wish to defend what exists. In any contest between the actual and the imagined, the imagined sparkles ever so more brightly.

The role of behavioral psychology in the iatrogenocide

Pharma weaponized belonging against us.

Pharma weaponized parents’ love for their children against us.

Pharma weaponized our deep respect for science against us.

Pharma weaponized normalcy bias against us.

Pharma created a crime so monstrous that few would believe it.

If most citizens of the world belatedly learned a novel coronavirus was spreading months before our authorities and experts said was possible, these citizens would have to conclude this was NOT a “deadly” virus … which would mean the world did not have a real “public health emergency” that required lockdowns and then mandated experimental mRNA injections.

But my real goal is NOT to prove early spread. My real goal is to prove that our trusted experts and authorities are hopelessly captured or corrupt … and, therefore, should no longer be trusted.

If the majority of the world population reached this conclusion, one assumes there would be a massive grassroots’ movement to purge these officials from their leadership positions (and bring them to justice).

Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.

You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

COVID-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

adding “mathiness” to an abstract caused people to rate it more highly in inverse proportion to how much they knew about math and models. ...

this seems to be a VERY pronounced effect and it gets worse the less expert in math you are.

i’d wager this effect gets even worse amongst liberal arts majors without advanced degrees… (this was not studied here)

the science crowd actually trusted “mathiness” perhaps a bit less than a study without it (not stat sig). but humanities loved it and educators etc really ate it up.

boy, that sure explains a lot about covid, covid models, and who went nuts trusting what, doesn’t it?

it also likely explains a great deal about why so many humanities majors and educators are convinced by the mathiness of global warming models and why far fewer who actually work in the hard sciences (apart from those whose grants depend upon it) are.

Thanks HeadSet

How did you change the text on the stone while keeping the stone background?

My Speech at the U.S. Senate

MATTIAS DESMET

Last Monday, I had the honor of being invited by US Senator Ron Johnson to engage in a panel discussion held at the U.S. Senate, titled ‘Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?'. ...

Kant believed the tradition of Enlightenment would produce a new citizen who could think for himself, but until now, the opposite turns out to be true: it produced the ideal citizen of the totalitarian state, which Hannah Arendt defined as a citizen who cannot distinguish between reality and fiction.

After the communist and fascist totalitarianism of the twentieth century, we currently witness the emergence of a technocratic and transhumanist totalitarianism. It manifest in the typical way totalitarianism does: as a diabolic pact between the elite and the masses. ...

The rationalist view on man and the world also had some unexpected psychological effects at the level of the population: the focus on rationally understanding the outward appearance of phenomena alienated people from inner experiencing and the ethical dimension of life and disconnected the human being from its fellow human beings and from nature around it.

These two evolutions, the emergence of an elite that uses propaganda and a lonely and disconnected population, reinforced each other. The lonely state is exactly the state in which a population is particularly vulnerable for propaganda. In this way, a new kind of masses or crowds emerged throughout the last two centuries: the so-called lonely masses. This process of mass-formation makes people radically incapable of taking a critical distance of the narratives spread through media, it makes them radically willing to self-sacrifice and it makes them radically intolerant for dissonant voices (think about the aggressive censorships of dissonant voices during the coronacrisis and throughout the 2020 US elections).

As society falls prey to propaganda, it becomes ever more clear that there is an urgent need for what the ancient Greeks called Parrhesia or sincere speech. From a psychological point of view, it can be argued crystal clear that Truth Speech both inhibits mass-formation (and hence also totalitarian systems which are always based on mass-formation) and the root cause of mass-formation, which is the disconnectedness and loneliness.

This is the point I make: it’s time for a metaphysical revolution, a revolution, which, essentially, at the psychological level, boils down to this: the switch from a society ruled by lonely masses in the grip of propaganda to a society guided by a group united through sincere speech.

Belonging

What’s striking to me about Covid is that, at the end of the day, most people fall in line to support empire, no matter how ruinous it is to themselves or others.

I think it’s 80/20. 80% of people will side with empire no matter what. And 20% of people are capable of thinking for themselves.

A tragedy disguised as a farce

Covid was the first genocide in history where people were like, “Woo hoo, I get to genocide myself today, let’s go!” Three years later as their friends are dropping dead left and right they’re still like, “Woo hoo, 9th booster, just had a stroke, bladder cancer, and cardiac arrest, let’s go!” ...

Universal truths

I’m struck by this fatal contradiction at the heart of modern progressivism.

On the one hand, following Foucault, they argue that there are no universal truths, only individual perspectives.

On the other hand, following Pfizer, they argue that junk science vaccines are a universal truth that must be mandated for the whole population.

My hunch is that progressives never really believed the postmodern claim to no universal truths.

Postmodernism is just a crowbar to destabilize the truth claims of one’s opponents.

Underneath it all progressives are deeply authoritarian and believe that they have a monopoly on truth and thus have the right and responsibility to rule over others.

Underneath it all progressives are deeply authoritarian and believe that they have a monopoly on truth and thus have the right and responsibility to rule over others.