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Can you imagine the mental process of someone becoming red-pilled about leftism?


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2021 Oct 17, 1:14pm   2,104 views  67 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

The war we are in is mostly psychological.

The left still mistakenly trusts Biden and the corporate-woke authoritarian ideology. They cannot accept that they are merely being used by large corporations to divide and weaken the voting public and to drive down wages for the benefit of the oligarchy. They cannot even think that thought. It creates anxiety in them.

What would make them lose their trust in the lies? Gas prices, inflation, shortages, humiliating chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan? I'm not sure that those made a difference yet. Maybe when they have a relative or friend die from the mandated vaxx - that might do it. Especially when children die, as many will when Newsom's order to inject children is implemented.

It's important to understand that the left has to get over a big hill of pain in realizing how wrong they've been. So they don't want to think those thoughts.

They think they have to "join the evil other tribe" in order to question to question their own, and that would be an unacceptable humiliation. But there is no need for humiliation. There is only the need to step outside that false dichotomy.

To be a progressive, you have to have trust, because you believe that your worldview accurately reflects the real world—as experienced not just by your own small eyes, but by humanity as a whole.

But you have not shared humanity’s experience. You have only read, heard and seen a corpus of text, audio and video compiled from it. And compiled by whom? Which is where the trust comes in. More on this in a little bit.

I am not a progressive, but I was raised as one. I live in San Francisco, I grew up as a Foreign Service brat, I went to Brown, I’ve been brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine since the mid-80s. What happened to me is that I lost my trust. ...

So our first small step toward doubt is easy: we simply allow ourselves to suspect that the institutions which progressives trust are fallible in the same way. If NPR can replicate errors just as Fox News does, we are indeed looking at a virus Y. Virus Y may be right when virus X is wrong, wrong when virus X is right, right when virus X is wrong, or wrong when virus X is wrong. Since the two have no consistent relationship to reality, they have no consistent relationship to each other.

There’s a seductive symmetry to this theory: it solves the problem of how one half of a society, which (by global and historical standards) doesn’t seem that different from the other, can be systematically deluded while the other half is quite sane. The answer: it isn’t. ...

If you can find a way to stop being a progressive without becoming a conservative, you might even find a way to actually oppose the government. At the very least, you can decide that none of these politicians, movements or institutions is even remotely worthy of your support. Trust me—it’s a very liberating feeling.


https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives/?source=patrick.net

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29   AmericanKulak   2022 Feb 19, 11:47pm  

Leftists just hate themselves, and extrapolate that to society. Since they are too ugly, inside or out or both, they have to have faith in the Blank Slate, and that Human Nature can be changed by Social Engineering. Thus the frumpy pear-shaped ugly chick might land the hunk, if the hunk can be raised to value knowledge of Teenage Vampire Romance more than T&A or Cooking Skills. Likewise for the Soyboy feminist; the Hot Chick will see his shining lights and his deep understanding of the world gleaned from watching Anime.

Different than modern liberals, though they share kind of an arrogant, hyperrational attitude. Modern Liberals have too much of the Feminine. Leftists are just Toxic fucks.

Traditional liberals are fearful of the stupidity humans can get up to with too much power.
31   Patrick   2022 Feb 25, 1:13pm  

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/19/america-is-not-divided-its-being-hijacked/?source=patrick.net

We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left.
32   Onvacation   2022 Feb 25, 4:29pm  

Patrick says
We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left.

Exactly!

If all the criminals in power were exposed and prosecuted and the... Never mind. I am too cynical to go any further with this fantasy.

A dear friend (vaxxed and boosted) who is captured by the narrative put it in words, "Why should I give up on the media I have trusted my entire life and listen to some conspiracy theorist on the internet?".
33   Bd6r   2022 Feb 25, 4:52pm  

Patrick says
We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left

Patrick,
Talk to educated yet idiot class and you'll think otherwise.
34   richwicks   2022 Feb 25, 5:00pm  

WineHorror1 says
richwicks says
I only joined the Republican party to cast a primary vote for Ron Paul, then they cancelled the vote when he was going to win in 2008.

@richwicks, are you able to explain what, exactly, happened to Ron Paul when he was about to win? I've never seen an explanation I understood.


@WineHorror1 - he was about to win the San Francisco straw poll. I had a terrible dinner that cost $35, listened to Fred Thompson explain why he should be nominated for 30 minutes, and after that, a HORDE of Ron Paul supporters walked in (dinner wasn't mandatory to vote), and the vote was simply cancelled. That was in 2008.

Nothing "happened to Ron Paul", but it was very very clear that in the primaries, the candidates aren't picked by individual supporters. They are picked by the parties.

Ron Paul was well regarded because he was fairly consistent about talking about the disaster of US "interventions". George W. Bush was PROPERLY despised for lying this nation into a war. Paul had run as a libertarian before, he is reasonable, and he's pretty honest for a politician. He dominated all online polls. He was like a proto-Trump.

Trump was wealthy, didn't need to accept bribes, and could tell nearly anybody to go fuck themselves. He seemed like, perhaps, he was so narcissistic, that perhaps, he just wanted to go down in history as somebody that fixed or at least improved the country. There's been nobody like that since Reagan and he didn't have money, and he was shot in his first term. George H. Bush really ran the nation for most of Reagan's term.

We live under a criminal syndicate. That's the reality. Democracy and Republic - that's all bullshit.

in 2008 I was 36. I still had some belief in the system. I was still naive back then. What happened was somewhat shocking to me, but what was really shocking to me is that despite dozens of people recording this, nothing came of it. I saw the aftermath, and it was clear even back then that Google didn't allow free speech, and "viral videos" were selected, and not actually reflecting what people sought out.
35   GNL   2022 Feb 25, 5:01pm  

Patrick says
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/19/america-is-not-divided-its-being-hijacked/?source=patrick.net

We are not really that divided. We just get that impression because of the media control by the left.

Yes, the media has an outsized influence over society.



36   GNL   2022 Feb 25, 5:05pm  

richwicks says
the candidates aren't picked by individual supporters. They are picked by the parties.

@Richwicks

That brings up a logical question..."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?
37   Bd6r   2022 Feb 25, 5:11pm  

richwicks says
Ron Paul supporters walked in (dinner wasn't mandatory to vote), and the vote was simply cancelled. That was in 2008.

He was redistricted out of his safe R district in TX. R's in TX made it swing district to get rid of him. Strange until you undsrstand that it is uniparty
38   richwicks   2022 Feb 25, 5:13pm  

WineHorror1 says
richwicks says
the candidates aren't picked by individual supporters. They are picked by the parties.

@Richwicks

That brings up a logical question..."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?


Two possibilities I can think of:

1) he figured out the system AND had backing to go up against it. I don't think it's possible he worked alone in this case.
2) he was controlled opposition.

I'm doubtful with #2 simply because his presidency destroyed the credibility of our propaganda. Our "news" media is now widely regarded for what it actually is, obvious propaganda.

You must know how deeply cynical I am, but I still have some hope for #2.
39   richwicks   2022 Feb 25, 5:17pm  

Bd6r says
richwicks says
Ron Paul supporters walked in (dinner wasn't mandatory to vote), and the vote was simply cancelled. That was in 2008.

He was redistricted out of his safe R district in TX. R's in TX made it swing district to get rid of him. Strange until you understand that it is uniparty


I suspected it back in the mid 1990's, but I was certain of it when Pelosi said that "impeachment is off the table" for George W. Bush. He should have been impeached. Obama should have been as well for creating 2 more wars.

Scum runs our government. None of the conflicts in the last 20 years has benefited the United States and its people in any way. Just a few individuals and companies. Our government creates war to benefit corporations now and it might be logical to consider a corporation as a mafia at this point.
40   Bd6r   2022 Feb 25, 5:20pm  

richwicks says
Just a few individuals and companies

Oligarchy
All new is well forgotten old
42   Onvacation   2022 Mar 1, 6:44am  

WineHorror1 says
."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?

Trump was hired because they thought Hillary could easily defeat him. They tried to run an unknown black man with a racist past but he beat her. They thought a womanizing playboy billionaire who was also old, white, and male would be the ticket to put the first woman in the oval office. They thought wrong.
43   GNL   2022 Mar 1, 10:11am  

Onvacation says
WineHorror1 says
."How/why, then, was Trump allowed to get the nomination"?

Trump was hired because they thought Hillary could easily defeat him. They tried to run an unknown black man with a racist past but he beat her. They thought a womanizing playboy billionaire who was also old, white, and male would be the ticket to put the first woman in the oval office. They thought wrong.

Black?
44   Onvacation   2022 Mar 1, 10:48am  

WineHorror1 says
Black?

African American? Negro? Mullato? What race is Obama?
45   Patrick   2022 Mar 1, 12:58pm  

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-rising-role-of-the-agitariat?s=r&source=patrick.net

many have marveled at the speed at which the covidian clamorers have pivoted to war frenzy. it was near instant, like some sort of phase change, a sublimation straight from solid to gas.

but this is no marvel nor is it, in fact, even a state change. it’s just a property of the new class of society that spends its lives in and derives its identity from its constant state of aversive arousal and agitation. this tribe is always and everywhere at war because its identify is rooted not in self but in “against.”

this is the agitariat.

we like to imagine ourselves as people who have ideas. this is a healthy structure. but for many, this is less and less true. many have become their ideas and woven their externalized values so deeply into the marrow and integument of their identities that the two become inseverable. the inherent tendency of social media to devolve into tribes enhances and perhaps even requires this.

i suspect it comes down to simple human drives to be perceived as virtuous (however such is currently defined) and for status (a similarly fluid hierarchy). ...

you have oppressed me, therefore i claim the moral high ground.

in a pinch, alliance with the aggrieved and championing them against others while engaging in performative self-flagellation and the “checking of privilege” will do.




... “i am kind” cuts no ice with those who demand that you demonstrate loyalty to a performative cause. “all lives matter” becomes a heretical utterance, proof that you are racist. this is a weaponized evangelical set of doctrines carried by weaponized evangelical people who must always divide the world into a fight between “us” and “them” in order to preserve personal meaning and coherence. that is the nature of deriving one’s sense of self from oppositional external validation. ...




... a week ago they all claimed to know a child who died of covid. now they all know a brave ukranian who stopped a tank with his bare hands.

last year no sane human would take trump’s bleach-based poison. today you’re a subhuman horror for refusing the beneficence of the “fauci ouchie.” ...

this has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying causes: it’s entirely about status and identity.

this is why they can all flip so instantly from one cause to another. the covid narrative is in tatters. having supported lockdowns and masking and vaccine mandates is increasingly low status. you look like a loser. you look wrong. and that is NOT a pleasing basis for an identity for those who generate their sense of self from their performative political takes. so you jump onto the first high status looking bandwagon that rolls by.

this has several weird, non-intuitive effects.

old causes suddenly vaporize and are gone from all memory. remember when i told you there would soon be a time when you could not find anyone that admitted to having been pro lock down, mask, up, and close the schools? well, this is how that works. the switch flips, the virus is gone, and we have always been at war with russia.

new causes suddenly explode. all this energy has to go somewhere and the need for new identity is acute and so new fights are entered into with the zeal of the freshly converted and the evangelism of those desperate to carve out new space and paper over what they were saying last week.

this adds a certain amount of full blown randomness to predominant social memes. had the ukraine war been this time last year, they probably would not have cared. they were still happily ensconced in branch covidianism. just about no one even noticed when the russians used chemical weapons in syria. there was no call to defend the “brave kurds.” it’s not racism. it’s just that the “jingo” slot was already full. there was no room for the meme. ask the uighurs about that one…

this means there will always be something. there is no climbdown, no cessation. this energy cannot be destroyed or dissipated because the need to put oneself in opposition as an act of self-definition is persistent. something must fill the void. they were all doing the same stuff pre-covid too.

wanna try a fun project? see if you can find anyone on twitter with pronouns in their bio that opposed lockdowns and masking. it’s all the same desire to create an identity suitable for ennobling the desire to bully as civic and personal virtue. it’s all the same people, over and over.

and that means that the clever demagogue can get in front of these issues and, at least to some extent, steer this energy. you dial back the CDC and the states out of political exigency and then immediately replace it with another meme that is fully orthogonal. covid gone. war, front and center. you hide your climb down and draw attention away from the coming news of how pointless and harmful everything you spent the last 2 years imposing was. the economy is not bad because of bad covid policy, it’s from the war! the very people who demanded that you surrender your freedom to invasive technocrats now champion freedom for ukrainians. there is so much tail to wag, it’s not even clear there is a dog in here at all anymore.



46   Patrick   2022 Mar 13, 10:09am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/when-victimhood-game-everyone-loses/?source=patrick.net


When victimhood is a game, everyone loses
Give up on a left-wing politics whose purpose is to amplify our differences

March 12, 2022

Black History Month is now over, and we’ve moved on to Women’s History Month. In April, we’ll get the best of both worlds, with Black Women’s History Month. May will be Jewish-American Heritage Month, and then in June the nation will enjoy a blowout celebration of LGBT Pride Month, if the normalization (and commercialization) of the cause in recent years is any indication.

The point of all of this is to serve as an annual national re-ratification of diversity, inclusivity and equity as America’s preeminent causes... Everyone and their racial, sexual and gender identities are to be affirmed; all identities and behaviors are to be celebrated as an essential part of the rich panoply of our national identity. It is meant to appease, honor and even glorify. Everyone, we would think, should be made happy by the never-ending tolerance parties.

But some, apparently, are not. In a March 2 op-ed for the Washington Post, Cole Arthur Riley claims that the end of Black History Month means he can “finally breathe.” The problem, says Riley, is white people (surprise!). Riley explains:

Every year, what is intended to be a time of remembrance and storytelling becomes a month of additional labor — usually with very little notice — for Black people. It becomes a season when we must sell our stories and ideas to sate the appetites of White folk who want to feel as though they’ve done the right thing.

The problem, according to Riley, is that guilt-ridden white people are so zealous in their desire to hear and understand black voices that it becomes overwhelming for black Americans. ...

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah in a June 2020 op-ed complained about the frustrating burden of “distraught white and non-black friends who were overwhelmed with guilt and anxiety” because they might be sub-consciously perpetuating racist norms or power structures. White people simply can’t seem to get it right when it comes to showing the proper honor or deference to their black fellow citizens.

Indeed, for any white American trying to show proper deference or respect for black Americans, during Black History Month or during the other eleven months of the year, it’s a bit like trying to cross a minefield. If one tries to be “colorblind” or signals that he doesn’t care about the color of people’s skin, he perpetuates systemic racism by refusing to recognize and appreciate others’ identity and value. If a person goes out of his way to express interest in trying to understand the black experience in America, this also is problematic, because this could impose unfair burdens on blacks who tire of explaining all of this to ignorant, if well-meaning, whites. Whatever white people choose, they are bound to offend or upset someone. ...

Perhaps it was inevitable that this would happen, given the mainstreaming of “Oppression Olympics,” in which everyone in American society participates in a competition to determine who is the most victimized according to race, gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic status or disabilities. Everything, from advertising to sports to literature to entertainment is now influenced by a game that was once largely relegated to liberal activist groups and academic seminars. It is one in which participants are encouraged to discover ever more novel and obscure ways in which they suffer victimization (e.g. microaggressions, unconscious bias) from bigoted, oppressive power structures. By these rules, people win by losing. ...

All of this reinforces victimhood for one group, and encourages one of two responses from the other: a mimicry of victimhood, or even more outlandish attempts at repentance. It has to be this way, or otherwise the contest might actually approach its conclusion. And there are of course political, social and financial reasons why those playing the victimhood game — especially the winners (or do I mean losers?) — aim to keep it going indefinitely.

This won’t end well for anyone. One possible scenario is that all the contestants in the victimhood game will consume each other in a suicidal battle to the bottom, or that those identifying as victims will eventually determine their best option is social and political revolution to end oppression. Another, possibly more beneficial outcome would be for the cost of the Oppression Olympics to become so great that those expected to play the role of penitent victimizer simply won’t put up with the absurdity of it any more — although this could provoke some dramatic protest from ersatz victims that might also cause increased tensions and unrest.

The fact remains that the game by its very nature exhausts its participants. One hopes all sides might eventually acknowledge that perhaps its tiring (and tiresome) qualities are reason enough to just abandon the whole project. I have empathy for people like Riley, Attiah and many other supposed victims, who exist in an endless cycle of tokenist offense and outrage — who would really want to permanently live like this? Does life really feel that terrible for them, whose writings appear in one of the most important and popular media outlets in the country?

Wherever the victimhood game leads, I decided to stop playing a long time ago. The cynical exploitation and performative self-flagellation simply became too obvious and risible. For the sake of our republic, I hope many Americans soon come to the same conclusion.
47   mell   2022 Mar 13, 10:13am  

Exactly. How many people have been deliberately killed in hospitals by withholding ivermectin and steroids and then these killings were used to force deadly jabs in kids and adults? But sure go ahead and virtue signal for the minority of the day and hate everyone else as enablers of inequity. Pathetic lol
50   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2022 Mar 19, 9:52pm  

Patrick says






ukrainian army does that too. then we read “omg they bombed a hospital”
51   AmericanKulak   2022 Mar 20, 8:38am  

Patrick says


This account is hilarious.

She also has this linked:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1500076163691171840?s=20&t=8td14G3fC-gDspOqR_iPhQ&source=patrick.net

"Why are a bunch of people carrying plastic bags full of junk from out from under a bridge." Seriously, they are coming out from the ruins of a bridge with various bags full of stuff. Did they live under the bridge with all that stuff? For people who just climbed out from under the wreckage of the bridge (supposed to be homes), their jackets are clean, no dust, no obvious wounds, carrying bags of random junk and the old ladies have new clean purses.

Whole thing is staged.
52   komputodo   2022 Mar 20, 9:18am  

richwicks says
I would have been considered by most to be "a leftist" in 2002. But I'm not a conservative.

Why does everyone have to be something? Why not be yourself without any labels?
53   komputodo   2022 Mar 20, 8:25pm  

AmericanKulak says
This account is hilarious.

She also has this linked:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1500076163691171840?s=20&t=8td14G3fC-gDspOqR_iPhQ&source=patrick.net

"Why are a bunch of people carrying plastic bags full of junk from out from under a bridge." Seriously, they are coming out from the ruins of a bridge with various bags full of stuff. Did they live under the bridge with all that stuff? For people who just climbed out from under the wreckage of the bridge (supposed to be homes), their jackets are clean, no dust, no obvious wounds, carrying bags of random junk and the old ladies have new clean purses.

Whole thing is staged.

I think I even saw someone carrying a Subway Samich bag.
54   komputodo   2022 Mar 20, 8:28pm  

Onvacation says
African American? Negro? Mullato? What race is Obama?

JIG
55   Patrick   2022 Mar 28, 8:24pm  

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/announcing-a-hostile-takeover-of?s=r&source=patrick.net

Apparently it never occurred to anyone on the left that perhaps they could be wrong.

The intellectual and moral collapse of the left accelerated and became complete in response to the pandemic. The left was handed a straightforward problem — a rogue federal bureaucrat, in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry, engineered a gain-of-function virus in collaboration with a Chinese bioweapons lab that got out and started killing millions of people.

To use a baseball analogy, this was a languid fastball right over the middle of the plate. The left should have been able to crush this pitch into the outfield bleachers. Arrest Fauci; distribute safe, cheap, and effective antiviral and antibacterial treatments that the CDC already knew would work against coronaviruses; nationalize Pharma; suspend trade relations with China; problem solved. ...

Handed a golden opportunity to show that the meritocratic, progressive, regulatory state could effectively govern when it actually matters, the left went full Pharma fascist instead. All logic, reason, and principles went out the window in an instant. The party became all lizard brain all the time and rushed to set up Pharma Jim Crow, Pharma Apartheid, and Pharma Fascism in any jurisdiction under their control. The Democratic Party became the point of the spear for the most deadly and corrupt industry on earth in violation of all of their anti-corporate principles.

Nothing they tried worked because nothing they did was based on actual science.

It was not just the Democratic politicians who succumbed to Pharma junk science and propaganda. The brightest scholars on the left, one by one, announced their hatred for logic and reason and their love for Pharma Fascism.
56   richwicks   2022 Mar 29, 1:35am  

komputodo says
richwicks says
I would have been considered by most to be "a leftist" in 2002. But I'm not a conservative.

Why does everyone have to be something? Why not be yourself without any labels?


I'm NOT labeling myself.

I would have been considered to be on the left by most people because I was against the Iraq War, and was right to be against it, because the war wasn't justified - we had to be lied into it and I knew the Bush administration was lying about it.

I would have been considered to be "conservative" when was against the bombing of Libya and Syria, because, again, we needed to be lied into it and we were.

Most people can only think in terms of left and right. A government that needs to constantly deceive its population is an illegitimate government, but I'm no anarchist either.

I can tell you what I'm not and it might sound pretty goddamned arrogant to self appoint a label of what I think I might be, or at least aspire to be.
57   Shaman   2022 Mar 29, 9:14am  

Now, war is supported by both parties and most especially by the Left.
What a dirty game politics is!
58   Patrick   2022 Mar 31, 9:51am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/we-are-all-still-prisoners-of-the-sixties/?source=patrick.net


In a nation pledged to equality and freedom, until a dozen or so years ago, inequalities of intelligence, wealth and talent were almost universally accepted as the human condition. Equity envisions something else. Differences in individual achievement stem from racism, prejudice and social injustice. Identities are unrestricted and self-defined, including male and female.

A fantastic, cartoonish vision of social improvement tangles into whites-only gun control, defunding the police, gender neutrality, and perhaps pet therapy for the criminally insane. Each progressive cause and craziness seems backed up by well-staffed office, a pro bono legal staff, and 501(c)(3) tax exemptions. Any effort to contain or reverse organized lunacies meets legal and judicial resistance.

What was formerly outré or unimaginable — even after the almost anything-goes Sixties — is vogue, and to resist is to court ridicule or ruin. The insensate and fantasists are not just a few sociopaths living in shadows. They might include the local junior high school principal or Episcopal minister. ...

Contemporary anomie’s most disturbing symptom is trans-mania, brought to life with Obama directives extending anti-discrimination rules in the federal workforce to cover transgender employees. The idea has been sustained through an orchestrated, well-funded political crusade, one that the NCAA and other organizations dare not negate. The “trans” narrative and what it demands take the US into neverland.

If advocates and officials can compel the nation’s institutions, legal system, agencies of culture, and common folk to resituate collectively against male and female, persuading or forcing a critical mass to abandon binary sexuality, then Americans can be made to do or believe anything. ...

What was that all about, some will ask, as if awakening from a bad dream. Others will be tidily amnesiac, and a few surgically damaged for life. The judges and lawyers, doctors and admirals, entertainers and academics who promoted the madness will do their best to sustain — if not their malevolent narrative — their power and reputations. ...

As with leech cures and lobotomies, gender re-assignment will someday be repudiated, joining other discredited, can-you-believe-it medico-social adventures. Human instinct will win. It might not be tomorrow, but whatever the narrative, defying nature and cellular science are not good bets in the long run.
59   Patrick   2022 Apr 2, 6:59pm  

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/your-top-priority-is-the-emotional?s=r&source=patrick.net


Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them.
Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object.
60   Undoctored   2022 Apr 3, 2:06pm  

Did some civil rights activism yesterday by trying to get into a concert requiring proof of recent vaccination. I asked why I as an unvaccinated person couldn’t get in, that this was discrimination on the basis of medical condition which is illegal as per the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The staff at the door said it was my personal choice but I’d have to live with the consequences, I said if an interracial couple wanted to stay at a hotel in 1963 Alabama they could would be kept out just because of their “personal choice.” Was that right? Or did the venue have the right to keep a gay man out for being gay — his choice but he’d have to live with the consequences?

The gatekeepers were stumped. As were an elderly couple on a bench who I assume had been supporters of the civil rights movement back in the day. I really don’t think they understood the moral logic in the first place. Most people who pass themselves off as liberals have always just memorized which people are good and which are bad and never think about the liberalist principle that forms the basis for our civil rights laws.
61   Patrick   2022 Apr 8, 8:01pm  

https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/new-religions-and-old-heretics?s=r&source=patrick.net


At some point in the past decade, the pendulum began to swing back in the other direction. People like Jordan Peterson began to speak out and gained popularity rather quickly in his fight against the Canadian Parliament legislating compelled speech. A conservatism that absorbed politically homeless marooned liberals and even religious conservatism to some degree has risen to become the counterculture.

I recently observed in a piece that in the absence of religion or religious beliefs something was always going to fill that void. The obvious example often proffered here is the replacement with communism as a new religion that was just as deadly as ancient religions and led to massive human suffering in just the last century alone, and yet doesn't appear to be finished with its mission.

Today we have the resurgence of something similar with leftist totalitarian tinged functionaries that view the managerial state as its new (old/communism) religion (support, guidance, control, power) that can further its other tenets such as wokeism, the various identity movements (DIE) rooted in progressive and Marxist critical studies that explicitly undermine basic science, and even what I would call the cult of climate change or the green cult.

What they all appear to have in common (other than ideological aims to remake the world) is they claim to be rooted in academic research, even if much of it is made up or fabricated to benefit an ideological agenda, yet still peer-reviewed and published as if to merely reinforce that agenda at the level of information dissemination. I’m thinking of the "Grievance Studies Affair” here as just one event that exposed this academic corruption but as someone who has been around academia (probably for too long) I’ve seen it up close and first hand in the social sciences. The EU is particularly insidious in this regard, funding projects that tend to reinforce the dominant neoliberal views of Brussels bureaucrats, or popular beliefs of far-left activists, and any study that might challenge or undermine the social and political engineering agendas of this tribe is simply not funded.
62   BayArea   2022 Apr 9, 2:25am  

porkchopexpress says
I've seen Left-wingers go Right wing, but I've never seen the reverse except in rare cases when someone leaves oppressive religion and swings the pendulum too far the other way.


If you are young and conservative, you have no heart.
If you are old and liberal, you have no brain.

Natural transition is overwhelmingly left to right with time, not the other way around.

I once was young and liberal. Then I got older, wiser, and more experienced. My views then changed.
63   Undoctored   2022 Apr 9, 9:54am  

Patrick says
https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/new-religions-and-old-heretics?s=r&source=patrick.net


A conservatism that absorbed politically homeless marooned liberals and even religious conservatism to some degree has risen to become the counterculture.


Ah yes, the original definition of “alt-right”: a marvelous term describing the hip, diverse, freedom-loving, liberal-in-spirit coalition with true respect for traditional social values and acceptance of innate differences between men and women, yet championing a society with equal opportunity for all, no special privileges based on sex, race, religion, color, or creed, and with consenting adults able to do as they please.

Of course this powerful term and the movement that it so succinctly described had to be destroyed.
64   Patrick   2022 Apr 10, 11:04am  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/why-david-mamet-went-right/?source=patrick.net


There are two kinds of liberal apostates: those who claim to be a fixed point in a changed world. It’s not me it’s them, claims this sort. And those who undergo a thoroughgoing conversion. Mamet is the latter. He’s a defector.

His break from the left was decisive. “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’” read the headline of a piece by Mamet in the Village Voice announcing his departure in 2008. That title — not his choice — still annoys Mamet. “It just threw me out of the left,” he says. “I think [the Voice] is gone now. Rest in peace,” he adds with a little relish. Not that the headline really misrepresented Mamet’s position: “I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind,” he wrote in the article.

“I didn’t know any conservatives,” says Mamet of his younger self. “You never met a single conservative.” Coming up in theater at his age and living in big cities was to be safely cocooned in a liberal bubble. A place where, he says, bemoaning the right’s latest move was like talking about “terrible weather”: “Did you see what that son of a bitch Nixon, or Reagan, or Thatcher did today?”

And so the conservatism he would grow into was self-taught. “I started reading. I came across The Road to Serfdom,” he says. After Friedrich Hayek came Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. (Sowell, a prominent black conservative economist and, like Mamet, a man who started his political journey on the left, is the person cited more than any other during our conversation.) “My reading got broader and broader and I thought, I’ve got to take this down to the bare paint.” Next came Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers. Out of that came a realization of the “extraordinary brilliance of the American experience.” ...

Mamet’s view of Washington is as unsentimental as his view of Hollywood: “People go into these professions to get power, and power to get sex, or sex to get power, money to get sex or power, and power to get money. That’s what these protected professions are all about… Trump was a countervailing force.”
65   Undoctored   2022 Apr 11, 8:34pm  

Patrick says
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/why-david-mamet-went-right/?source=patrick.net


There are two kinds of liberal apostates: those who claim to be a fixed point in a changed world. It’s not me it’s them, claims this sort. And those who undergo a thoroughgoing conversion. Mamet is the latter. He’s a defector.


Joe Rogan happened to interview Mamet last week, did you know?

Official link:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EGUBSTWebFwgzfr96q2Ci?si=8g82hqhwRUycV41XdaK1ZQ&source=patrick.net

Clips from the interview on Rumble:
https://rumble.com/search/video?q=mamet+rogan&source=patrick.net

Haven’t listened to any of it yet.
66   Patrick   2022 May 16, 10:17pm  

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/on-the-failure-of-conservatives-to


The conservative is an instinctive defender of traditional, organic structures, “which function precisely because of their organic nature, that is to say because nobody planned them consciously or with intent” (p. 15f). The leftist, meanwhile, is an innovator, who deploys his theories and utopian hopes against the received tradition. Like many organic things, our traditional institutions have an intuitive appeal that is nevertheless difficult to articulate and entirely foreign to leftist theory. Things like marriage and the family, religious communities, and even the human immune system, are organic solutions to ancient problems, worked out over millennia of cultural and biological evolution. Not even their most ardent defenders understand their purposes or functions fully. Conservatives are therefore rhetorically disadvantaged: “The only conclusive proof that these structures are irreplaceable comes when one has destroyed them, and realised that no replacements are in sight. But then it is too late.” The leftist critique of traditional institutions, meanwhile, undermines the functioning of traditional society. ...

The problem is that we live in an inverted order. The leftist opposition has taken charge; the conservative conformists have been driven into the opposition. The left sustains this inversion through its permanent revolution, its constant and ever-renewed assaults on the stability of society. The conservative, who remembers only his former position in the ruling class and remains fixated on returning to the halls of power, neglects populist solutions and seeks only to ingratiate himself with the leftists who hold the keys. ...

This “three-fold own goal – to fail to advocate for your own position, to make yourself responsible for it nevertheless, and to vilify it on top of that” is central to a broader cultural process, via which traditionalist political positions are condemned as heresy by left- and right-wing parties alike, banished from polite company, and finally censored and even criminalised. ...

MKH sees this broken approach as a misbegotten attempt to appropriate the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions. “[T]o learn from one’s opponents does not mean, necessarily, that it is a good idea to copy them” (p. 51); the ideological asymmetries of left and right confound conservative hopes of reverse infiltration. To begin with, leftists got into power by playing to the sense of fairness that prevailed within the twentieth-century liberal establishment. This older guard of elites were prepared to concede access and even power to their political opponents; in their minds this largesse confirmed their own legitimacy. The left knows no such fairness; as soon as they took charge, they set about bricking up all the passages via which they came to power themselves. Today, the establishment left demands nothing so much as absolute conformity to its views, and admits mostly yes-men and careerists to its circles. There will be no equivalent institutional march for the right. ...

For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. ...

The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards.
67   Patrick   2022 May 17, 11:31pm  

Comments from the same source:


The trucker protest in Canada gave us a glimpse of the power of the people. The indignation and disgust heaped on them, and the emergency law enacted to stop them showed how scary this was for both sides of the political spectrum. This is the only possible hope, populism - and that is why both populism and freedom are now ultra-right-wing horrible dirty words that you cannot even utter in mixed company without fear of retribution.

you only have to look at the strange forces brought to bear on the protesters – asset seizures, etc – to see what an enormous threat they were

Populism transcends left-right binaries, for example, temperamentally right wing people wanted Amazon broken up because it destroys small indigenous businesses, those on the left because its not fair to the workers.

There's also a strange tension between the "democracy is a sham, protests don't work" and the needs of the regime to constantly manage public opinion. If they really were indifferent to public opinion the wouldn't expend so much time and resources doing so.

The truckers were in effect a kind of revolution without the guns. Starting with some 20% approval as the strike evolved approval climbed into the > 60%. Polling has been nearly impossible to find anymore. We understand why.

Ironically, given the striking similarities between the cognitive styles and left and right and the cognitive styles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, these terms may be more apt than we'd expected.

I suspect confidence is the determining factor. The leftists lack the confidence to let it all happen. They are control freaks. Hence the reason all they touch is destroyed.

The BBC routinely show women with young kids on boats in the English channel making a dangerous journey. The reality is some 99% are young men.

Women are famously easier to manipulate in this way.

Which is why no sane society lets them within a mile of politics.

... for the last few decades in the US, the only immigrants it was hard to get into the country for even a visit were mail-order brides, especially those from Eastern Europe and Asia. The excuse was always that they were trying to protect them from being exploited, of course, but oddly enough that never applied to brown fruit-pickers working for below minimum wage.

"He went to Washington to do good. He did very well, indeed." ...Unknown.

Plus lifetime, gold plated health insurance. Lst checked under Obama - MoC family plan with vision, dental, drug-alcohol rehab, mental health and zero deductible was $50/year. Who knows with inflation it may have doubled to 100 bucks yearly.. thank goodness Congress were able to vote themselves pay raises to absorb the impact.

Don't know about NZ, but here in the mother country I've often wondered if a truly balls to the wall traditional party would clean up. I mean, ending mass immigration, cutting all the bullshit and focusing on nuts and bolts things, including reducing the size of government.

I can't help thinking it would be massively popular. Especially if they just bluntly stated all the woke stuff is bullshit. I'd vote for them.

Like you my main memory from the Merkel’s Great Replacement will be the following: A video of Syrian “refugees” stepping out of a train at the Vienna main train station. While Austrians are welcoming them with flowers and open arms as a warm welcome, two Syrian teenagers give a hateful look at the camera and both make the “throat slicing” gesture with their right hand. And the apologizing comments from the journalist were even more scary: “You have to understand these kids have seen too much destruction and suffered from much deprivation.”

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