patrick.net

you yourself seem to be an exceptionally ungrateful beneficiary of the risks they took for your sake.

Please compare to Islam, where slavery continues down to the present day.

since the founding fathers were at the forefront of human rights

Patrick says

Please compare to Islam, where slavery continues down to the present day.

Why ?

Patrick says

since the founding fathers were at the forefront of human rights

Only for themselves and people they considered educated enough to vote. Everyone else was confined to the status quo if you will.

I hope you're better than that.

Their fight for human rights at the risk of their own lives, for "posterity" which includes you, was crucial in the establishment rights for everyone.

Patrick - now I get to be Antifa as well ?

If the founding father's were so benevolent

- why didn't they do away with slavery

Patrick what have you done for this country ?

It’s like Pharma just backed a truck up to the Progressive Values Factory; stole everything; modified core values in order to maim people, make money, and implement global totalitarianism; and the left is just out there smoking a cigarette on the loading dock saying, “Sounds good to me.” What!? What the heck happened to the left? Is there no one remaining in that tribe who is capable of logic and reason!? Quite literally the worst industry in the world stole the left’s most cherished values and no one on the left is the slightest bit offended by this (even though they are offended by everything else)!? We live in the bizarro upside down world.

gabbar says

Patrick says

1965 Academia gets serious about systematically undermining traditional gender roles, motherhood, the family, heterosexuality, patriotism, and Christianity, with the goal of weakening all forces which are preventing the Marxist revolution in America that they hope for.

I wasn't born in 1965. Can someone explain this, I want to learn

gabbar That was about the time that "education" became more about indoctrination into wokeness than about critical thinking.

https://notthebee.com/article/harvards-next-president-is-going-to-be-a-race-and-politics-professor

Self righteous always accuse the other side, but rarely see their own extensive shortcomings. A major clue is painting with a broad brush, accusing others of egoism because of some false comparison to a made up caricature straw man Bible thumper that supposedly represents every Bible believer, but in so creating and attacking this straw man the self righteous expose their own obvious feelings of moral superiority. I find that the self righteous people who are most vehement in their self righteousness are not religious in the traditional sense but rather they are atheists, “scientists” and/or God haters. Pathetic.

PeopleUnited says

Self righteous always accuse the other side, but rarely see their own extensive shortcomings. A major clue is painting with a broad brush, accusing others of egoism because of some false comparison to a made up caricature straw man Bible thumper that supposedly represents every Bible believer, but in so creating and attacking this straw man the self righteous expose their own obvious feelings of moral superiority. I find that the self righteous people who are most vehement in their self righteousness are not religious in the traditional sense but rather they are atheists, “scientists” and/or God haters. Pathetic.

Glad to see you making use of a mirror

Some of the most detestable people I have known in my life, constantly talked about how religious they were.

I'll turn positive when family structure comes back. It's fucked even in my own family. Having a Dad and Mom worked for centuries. Was/is it always perfect, fuck no. But we are collapsing at this point. Where 1% of the population can have parades half naked in major cities with their dicks out. That's not normal. At all. When you can post how gay you are and it's applauded, but as a man you're ridiculed for wanting to fuck your wife you're shot down by society. Up is down.....

According to the analysis, “in 2018, ‘Trump’ was the fourth most used word in the paper. On average, Trump was directly mentioned two to three times in every article, and indirectly mentioned an additional once or twice. ...

The Trump obsession was so all-consuming that in order for a story to be published, it became almost mandatory for writers to include the Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets. The Columbia Journalism Review reported that even placing international stories in American outlets was getting harder unless they directly involved The Donald. Book publishing was much the same. In 2018, each book at the top of the New York Times best-seller list shared one commonality: Trump. ...

If there should be any question as to whether the Trump bump was merely correlation, one need only look at what happened when Trump left office. News engagement and viewership numbers plummeted. ...

It’s not that the MSM was wrong to exploit Trump for a bump in clicks and subscribers and what have you; it’s how they did it. Objectivity was replaced with shrill, self-righteous advocacy journalism.

In a post I wrote back in August, I detailed the lengths that the MSM went to push the it’s-always-Trump’s-fault narrative, often outright lying. But they also profited from an artificially induced “Trump scare.” Immediately following his election, shrewd media executives realized that the whole amusement-type carnival coverage based on the what-if fairy tale they treated Trump’s campaign as all the way up to November 8, 2016 would no longer suffice.5 Trump as existential danger allowed them to commodify the Bad Orange Man scare, a transition that amplified the Trump bump rewards even more. Thus, the politicization of the media business began, contributing to society’s surge in polarization. ...

To keep numbers up and the money coming in, and to lure converts past the pesky paywall, the MSM had to successfully use what’s referred to in the PR world as “a call to action.” They settled on rhetoric specifically meant to incite fear and angst. At every possible occasion, Trump was portrayed as a demonic figure Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™, a madman who might well toy around with the nuclear codes for funsies on days that he got bored with Twitter, and whom no Good Person™ could possibly accept.

Notably, it wasn’t just Trump that they used for fear fodder, but the entire half of the electorate that supported him as well—the “MAGAts.” Ordinary Americans were vilified overnight, thereafter treated like some kind of mongol horde living amongst us in secret. Good People™ everywhere became paranoid: I just know Dave in accounting voted for that despicable man. I know it. I can just tell by the American flag sticker on the back of his car. That son of a bitch! ...

As polarizing agents within a new business model dependent on engagement and subscriptions, the MSM sells validation—of beliefs, not news. ...

The MSM’s new reliance on digital subscriptions means that the advertising-dictated necessity to appeal to the median American and practice objectivity is no more. The inherent liberal predisposition of the newsrooms is now unchecked by any financial imperative. This has led to the development of “post-journalism”—essentially, commentary commodified and sold as the modern-day version of news but which is funded through subscriptions, which are in turn solicited as donations. This new form of journalism sells not the news, not even the truth necessarily, but an ethos and an agenda to like-minded people; it identifies and exploits the ideological fears and values of a specific audience, then cultivates the content that audience will buy as part of a constructed worldview that can be altered to seduce.

... the best triggers are emotions, particularly fear and anger and outrage and angst, and as we all know well, the Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted are extremely sensitive to all things Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets.

Everything promoted by the left seems to lead to family breakdown and fewer children: atheism, militant feminism, promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, mRNA injections, and literal state-sponsored suicide as in Canada.

Edit: hooray, I've got my first ignore! I will wear it with pride.

Speech which offends no one ("Nice weather today") needs no protection.

December 23, 1913 - Federal Reserve created. Yes, I'm one of those "the central bankers are actually evil" people.

Edit: hooray, I've got my first ignore! I will wear it with pride.

Everything promoted by the left seems to lead to family breakdown and fewer children: atheism, militant feminism, promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, mRNA injections, and literal state-sponsored suicide as in Canada.

How the West Was Lost
BY DR JAMES ALEXANDER 4 MAY 2023 1:00 PM

Something is happening. We have several things we can do. The first thing is to observe it. The second is to criticise it. The third is characterise it. A fourth is to suggest causes.

By ‘it’, of course, I mean what has been clear since the emergence of COVID-19, and how this has altered our sense of the changes of the last 10 years (since the rise of political correctness 2.0), the last 50 years (since the cultural liberalisation of the 1960s), or even the last 200 years (since the religious and political liberalisation of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the British ‘National Apostasy’ associated with Catholic Emancipation, the Repeal of the Test Acts and the Reform Bill).

I see a lot of interesting suggestions, but no general statements, so offer this as an attempt to bring together as many lines of thought as possible.

The decline of the church
Until the separation of church and state in the centuries after the Reformation every state was also a church. The decline of the church and the rise of the secular state had consequences:
• the loss of an anchor or aspiration or standard ‘not of this world’
• a shift from concerning ourselves with salvation to betterment in this world
• the emergence of a need to find a new anchoring belief system for the state
• a tendency to build such a belief system out of policies claiming to better the world.
Overall, we sought justification in terms of what could be achieved in this world.

The rise of the cash nexus, trade and debt
In the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch, English and French experimented with remarkable new institutions of banks, bonds, stock exchanges and national debt. This had consequences:
• for the first time in history ‘growth’ could be achieved without conquest
• we increasingly came to see everything in the world as marketable
• there was much more commercial activity and travel (and, ironically, conquest)
• markets enabled remarkable corporate monopolies to emerge (monopolies which attempted to tie up those markets)
• debt enabled us to postpone responsibility, since our current activities could be funded by mortgaging the future.

The rise of bureaucracy
States increasingly concerned with this world and with a more complicated commercial world to preside over, and exploit, turned to bureaucracies to manage the situation. For the first time in the West a class of bureaucrats emerged, loyal not to a lord or a locality but the state. They were to be funded out of the public purse: taxes but also debt. Debt enabled not only great standing armies to be maintained, but also standing teachers and standing doctors. This had consequences:
• a shift from the old view that government should maintain law and order to a new view that government should manage and even educate the state
• an increasing use of statistics
• the emergence of a language of bureaucratic imperatives which for the last two centuries has existed alongside the similarly novel language of commercial imperatives.
Now these two, or three, languages exist alongside each other, and have drowned out the old languages of state law and order, and church. The new three languages, which exist alongside each other, and infect each other, are the language of bureaucracy (of the state or public monopoly) the language of corporations (of wealthy lobbying private monopolies), and the language of markets (of freely active private individuals). Together these three languages provide most of our current political language.

The rise of meritocracy
Education had for centuries been dominated by the church and state. Commerce had almost no effect on education. But bureaucratic imperatives led, in the nineteenth century, to the formation of new universities, and the adjustment of historic universities, which abandoned religious tests and developed academic subjects designed (at first indirectly; later directly, if spuriously) to serve the interests of the state. This had consequences:
• the emergence of a class educated in bureaucratic and corporate languages, as well as academic languages
• the emergence of a divide, evident only clearly with the expansion of the universities in the late 20th Century, between this educated class and the uneducated classes
• the demoralisation of the poor, who, without the church, had only their relative failure in commercial and corporate activity to give them a negative identity and otherwise had to build a positive identity out of the modern bread and circuses supplied by doles and media.
Populism is the politics of those excluded in the modern class divide.

The rise of specialisation
Until a certain point in history everyone was a generalist, from the farmer to the Renaissance gentleman. But commercial imperatives – Smith’s division of labour – as well as bureaucratic and corporate imperatives encouraged everyone in an increasingly complicated society to specialise. This had consequences:
• as the educated class became less generally educated and more specially educated there was an undermining of the old secular ‘republic of letters’ which constituted our culture between 1700 and 1950
• the rise of a difficulty about making general and wise assessments of the political worth of any policy under consideration
• the increased likelihood that a policy would only seem attractive if it was sanctioned by specialists: and only if the specialists could associate their policy with some sort of crisis
• the increased likelihood that the shared opinions or values of our society would be fatuous, since they were side effects of a media circus trying to generate excitement in the new boring languages.

The rise of political correctness
The decline of the church meant that the state, especially now with its phalanx of bureaucrats, required a belief system. Commercial, corporate and bureaucratic imperatives supplied the language: but could not supply anything more powerful. State ideologies appeared in dictatorships, but also in liberal societies. This had consequences:
• the state had to find a surrogate for religious belief
• this belief had to be confected out of educated opinion and the new public languages
• the belief had to be something sufficiently contorted that it would appeal to the educated class but appear to be beneficial to the uneducated class
• the result was ‘political correctness’, or a set of received values which could be used to distinguish those willing to swear allegiance to what were, in real terms, contradictory and self-defeating policies from those who wouldn’t or couldn’t.
The world of political correctness is a world in which the elite avow a ‘public’ belief which ostentatiously contradicts their ‘private’ interests: but enables them to flourish commercially, corporately or bureaucratically nonetheless. It offers nothing to the demoralised poor and uneducated.

The rise of a corporate-commercial-bureaucratic monopoly in politics
Politicians are trained in corporations, can expect to work for them after retiring, and are lobbied by them when in office. This has consequences:
• it is very hard to use any sort of available political language against the ruling elites or, what is the same thing, the educated class
• we have a ruling culture which is extremely fragile and fickle, since solidarity and unanimity can only be achieved by following fashions of unreal and hypocritical avowals of extreme sentimental allegiance to certain policies, usually supported by specialists and justified by crisis or spurious emotional identification
• the ‘public’ culture which exists now has almost no reality: it is a confection out of whatever successes private interests have had in using the available political language to create a pseudo-ideology of rationalist solutions and policy deliverance.

The emergence of a world of fractured crisis
Political correctness is partly a moral matter, where it is dominated by a concept of equality which has existed since the French Revolution; but it has also, in the last 50 years, become a matter of technology. Whereas before technology was positive, serving progress, now (in the prevailing ideology) it is associated with crisis, for better and worse. This has consequences:
• we are told that capitalist technological society has damaged the world by draining it of its resources leading to ‘climate crisis’ and ‘overpopulation’
• this justifies policies which damage the world, including the human world, far more than the problems they are designed to solve
• Covid-19 was a vivid instance of a crisis which was magnified by corporate and bureaucratic imperatives and the media circus until it dominated every other possible political concern and became the unlikely contender for the cause of the greatest solidarity ever seen by man.

The demoralisation of the educated
The demoralisation of the educated classes by climate politics, pandemic protocols and political correctness has so far been justified by the solidarity it has achieved in the service of the interests of bureaucrats and corporations: but it has alienated the uneducated classes and is in the course of alienating the educated classes to the point where they will have no ability to make adequate sense of any problem of genuine political concern. This has consequences:
• the instincts of the educated classes will be to generate solidarity negatively by undermining the continuity of their own civilisation and the capacity of their own state to deal with genuine problems in a realistic manner
• a culture is emerging in which unity is only affirmed by admitting to historical transgressions and signalling virtue by admitting guilt
• we are coming to believe that there is nothing of the value in the past, there is only bread and circuses in the present, and there is only repayment of debt in the future
• education is increasingly becoming an education in limited specialisations, in which incentives serve specialisation and in which unity is only found in what is encouraged by bureaucratic-corporate state propaganda (since everything else is to be discouraged as misinformation, disinformation—or atavism—and censored)
• the educated classes will continue to turn to specialists for answers, to indulge in hypocritical or fatuous politics of display, and to do so in such a way that they destroy their societies while claiming to save them.
One consequence of this is that the bureaucracy, which has one task, to serve the state and hence society, cannot see what the state as a whole requires, and out of specialisation and hypocritical moralisation and frank opportunism comes to serve corporate interests.

The end of identity
In an era in which nothing can be affirmed except whatever is required by the fashions of crisis, a premium is put on identity. The problem is that indeterminacy in our politics also threatens confidence in identity. Identities become political, some more admirable than others, and as much cultural appropriation and cultural disburdening takes place, so identity becomes malleable. This has consequences:
• no positivity is found in old identities associated with church and state (religious, imperial or national)
• everything must be globalised, abstracted and emptied out: especially our own civilisation
• women have been ‘emancipated’, and this has led to the overturning of the old sexual division of labour, causing much confusion of sexual activity and sexual identity (for both men and women): with the new political correctness positively valorising sexual confusion
• the freedom to do anything has developed into the freedom to be anything as long as there is the consent of others and the consent of the self
• we have become separated from nature, cushioned by technology and increasingly alienated even from our immediate selves
• we remain unformed and immature, confections of neurosis and narcissism.
All this is the consequence of living in a state which claims, fatuously and hypocritically, to do everything for us. Fatuous and hypocritical, because it is not true. But it is harder to say that it is not true: because our language has been corrupted by bureaucratic and corporate imperatives, creating noise and chaos like the final orchestral rising glissandos of Sgt. Pepper, above which we can increasingly only hear the dissonant siren falsettos of globalism, slave-morality and crisis.