by Patrick ➕follow (60) 💰tip ignore
« First « Previous Comments 14 - 35 of 35 Search these comments
Note how conformity and self censorship goes straight up with "education". It makes sense. Education is about obedience and accepting what you're told is true, not questioning the teacher.
rocketjoe79 says7 days? Bravo, sir! I'm right behind ya. Targeting Jun 30.
Happy to hear that, @rocketjoe79
richwicks says"Highly educated" people mostly learn from "experts" and as a result, they HAVE to be gullible in order to assimilate the information as people wouldn't waste their time getting a degree that they think is entirely bullshit.
Right, I think there's something to this.
Maybe everything.
Note how conformity and self censorship goes straight up with "education". It makes sense. Education is about obedience and accepting what you're told is true, not questioning the teacher.
The current American “regime” is most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy” in which an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in the bureaucracies of the administrative state, and at Harvard, The New York Times, and other leading institutions of civil society, promulgate and enforce their own version of “reality.” ...
And as we see, this oligarchy is neither liberal nor democratic. It is illiberal because it uses physical force to defend itself from disturbing ideas. It is undemocratic because its whole design is a fortress against populist politics, which it mocks and despises. Indeed, it is unconstitutional—since its purpose is to pervert the Constitution, creating a government in reality which is completely alien to the one specified on paper.
A tweet cost him his doctorate: The extent of China’s influence on Swiss universities
A Swiss Ph.D. student tweeted critically about China. Afterward, his professor at the University of St. Gallen wanted nothing more to do with him, worried that her own ability to get a visa would be at risk. ...
He had been tweeting for just 10 days, and had fewer than 10 followers. No question, he had been harshly critical of the Chinese government. For example, on March 21, he had posted, in English: «#CCP made fighting #COVID-19 plan B. Only to be executed if Plan A – covering it up – fails. Those are the actions of paranoid cowards. They neither deserve my respect nor gratitude #ChinaLiedPeopleDied».
Yet the student was shocked. This was supposed to be «neo-Nazi-like» content? He was sure there had been a misunderstanding. He replied at 11:11 p.m., wanting to know who the «angry emails from China» were from.
It astounds me that my Progressive friends — the same ones who claim to support “social justice” — are welcoming a fascist society in which government crushes any opposition and individuals cannot make choices about their own lives.
I will not comply because I do not want to live in the society that is being created by extraordinary submissiveness to government. I do not want to be complicit in this era’s atrocities.
What is the point of living if one merely exists to obey the elite to one’s own detriment? Is it even living if one lacks the agency to direct one’s life? I’ve already submitted in contradiction of my values to a shameful extent. One might say, “Well, what’s one more compromise,” but it won’t be just one more compromise. It will be just the next cut in a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Submitting only validates tyrannical displays of power and ensures that there will be more such displays in the future.
And what does one get for compromising? Merely your continued membership in a society that will only have you if you immolate yourself and become nothing more than a reflection of the desires of the ruling class.
If you cannot be truly yourself in a society, is that society worth clinging to? I think not. As much as leaving the stability of my comfort zone terrifies me, staying in it means continuing to silence and shrink myself for a disingenuous feeling of acceptance. In that way, it is more of a discomfort zone.
Each time I expressed my fears about the future direction of society, my friends said “it won’t happen.” Each time it did happen, they shrugged their shoulders and reminded me that compliance was an option.
It really isn’t that complex.
The injections you and many others were dragooned into taking under the threat of losing your job and your basic civil liberties do not protect you from getting Covid or passing it on.
Nor have they liberated you from mask-wearing, social distancing, the ongoing threat of lockdowns, and helpful advice from the government on how, and with whom, you can socialize at Christmas.
Among some populations, the risks of adverse effects are higher than from exposure to Covid.
Meanwhile, the mandates, enforcements, track-and-trace rituals, and now the bio-passports, continue to crush small enterprises and exclude huge swaths of minority populations from participation in public life.
The segregation in major cities is palpable and becoming more entrenched. Classes and events in large northeastern universities are being cancelled due to rising cases, and this is despite high vaccinations and masking.
The rituals and draconian impositions have not given us our lives and freedoms back. They continue to grind down marginalized peoples not only in the US but all over the world.
It’s all there to see for anyone disposed to going beyond the mental parameters established and enforced by legacy media.
So, the real question at play here is a psychological and spiritual one.
And it can be summarized more or less in the following fashion.
Are you as a member of the well-educated Western elite class prepared to explore the possibility that members of the sociological cohort to which you belong are capable of highly organized evil and deception rooted in a deep disdain for the core humanity and inherent dignity of all people?
Are you open to imagining that people—to borrow a phrase much-loved in certain circles— “who look like you,” live in “nice” neighborhoods like you, and want all the markings of the good life for their children like you, are also capable of monstrous deeds and the propagation of extremely damaging herd-induced stupidities?
Do you ever think of using the knowledge of history your prestigious education might have afforded you for something other than establishing favorable comparisons with the past that prop up the idea of Western man’s triumphant march of progress and, of course, your sociological cohort’s starring role within it?
For example, do you ever think about how Europe’s best and brightest sent millions of people to senseless deaths between 1914 and 1918, well after it was clear that doing so would do nothing to achieve the announced objectives of the conflict, objectives which were themselves based on deeply flawed logic and analytical assumptions?
Or will you avoid all that by mentally invoking a key, if largely unstated, conceit of late modernity’s meritocratic mind: that success within the games established to distribute elite power (such as entry into Ivied schools with big endowments and plum jobs in finance) confer upon the games’ winners a moral weight that effectively exonerates them from the type of moral scrutiny that they compulsively apply to other, “less accomplished” human beings?
This is a question that those of us of fortunate to be reasonably well-educated, reasonably well-fed and reasonably well-sheltered must now urgently confront.
And the manner in which the majority of us choose to respond to it will go a long way toward determining the shape of the world our children and grandchildren will inherit from us.
The very smart and educated people of Yale have decided to quarantine all of their students for the next month due to the very scary Omicron variant of Covid-19. ...
This is insanity.
And these are supposedly the smartest people around – the ones going to school here and the ones running the Ivy League institution!
Open Letter to Cornell President: Do the Right Thing, End Booster Mandate
More than 325 students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff of Cornell University signed an open letter to the university’s president and board of trustees opposing Cornell’s COVID booster mandate, warning the university would have to bear responsibility for death or disability caused by vaccines.
In big picture terms, then, that means the crusade against misinformation is not a tool designed to enforce belief in any particular piece of information, or “the truth” write large. Instead, it is designed to enforce loyalty to certain sources of information. The only way to be entirely safe from the misinformation label is to mindlessly reaffirm the latest declarations from a handful of official and quasi-official outlets. The push to demonize misinformation is therefore a push to consolidate all narrative control in the hands of a few regime-approved (and regime-compliant) institutions.
Look, I’m not sure what to do about the fear problem. I hate it as much as anyone. It isn’t just fear of this or that specific thing, it’s a generalized fear of risk in its entirety. Managerialism rules by mitigating risk; to whatever degree the people fear risk, managerialism’s rule is extended and deepened. The result has been the Safety First culture that wraps our world like a straightjacket. Safety First needs to be locked up in a hermetically sealed safe space and left to gibber to itself.
patrick.net
An Antidote to Corporate Media
1,260,075 comments by 15,047 users - Misc online now