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Prof Desmet (00:03:20): Yes. Four things need to exist or need to be in place if you want a large scale mass phenomenon to emerge. The first thing is that there needs to be a lot of socially isolated people, people who experience a lack of social bonds. The second one is that there needs to be a lot of people who experience a lack of sense-making in life. And the third and the fourth conditions are that there needs to be a lot of free-floating anxiety and a lot of free-floating psychological discontent. So: meaning, anxiety, and discontent that is not connected to a specific representation. So it needs to be in the mind without the people being able to connect it to something. If you have these four things—lack of social bonds, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent—then society is highly at risk for the emergence of mass phenomenon.
(00:04:27): And these four conditions existed shortly before the Corona Crisis. There was an epidemic of burnout. Over 40 to 70% of the people experienced their jobs as completely senseless. This is described in the book Bullshit Jobs by this professor of Harvard [David Graeber] of whom I always forget his name. (He died last year, I think.) Then if you look at the use of psychopharmaceuticals, it was huge. This shows how much discontent there was in our society. For instance, in Belgium every year 11 million people use over 300 million doses of antidepressants alone. Over 300 million doses. That’s huge. So you see that these four conditions really existed: lack of sense-making, lack of social bonds, free-floating anxiety, and then a free-floating discontent.
Prof Desmet (00:05:36): Yes. You have to know that free-floating anxiety is the most painful psychological phenomenon someone can experience. It’s extremely painful. It leads up to panic attacks, to all kinds of extremely painful psychological experiences. What people want in this situation is something to connect their anxiety to. They’re looking for an explanation for the anxiety. And now, if this free-floating anxiety is highly present in a population, and the media provide a narrative, which indicates an object of anxiety, and at the same time, describe a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety, then all the anxiety connects to this object and people are willing to follow the strategy to deal with this object, no matter what the cost is. That is what happens in the beginning of mass formation.
so when government says “you must do X” who is there to resist? 2/3 are dependent. even among those who are not, their abuelas probably are. how can you resist the hand the feeds you?
you can’t.
dependence = submission.
that’s a simple fact of life.
you cannot fight for rights when you are dependent upon another for your daily bread and medical care. you’ve been functionally enslaved and your mentality adjusts to match.
you live in mom’s basement, so you have to play by mom’s rules.
flew back to peurto rico yesterday after 4 months away.
after a summer of living with no covidiocy, it’s incredibly jarring to deal with airports, and the puerto rico nonsense society where i am now a second class citizen and cannot go to ~90% of bars, restaurants etc because i am not vaccinated . even those who ARE vaxxed play the stupid covid dance of put on mask, walk into restaurant, sit down, take off mask as though this could possibly have any effect. they walk muzzled and bovine though stores and supermarkets.
it’s like watching sad little circus dogs desperately performing the act that was beaten into them as puppies hoping for approval and freedom that will never come precisely BECAUSE they keep desperately performing on demand.
Nudge Tyranny
An Erfurt Professor of Health Communications advises the German government on how best to manipulate the populace.
eugyppius
14 hr ago
139
161
Cornelia Betsch is a professor of health communication at the University of Erfurt.
We read that she “and her team work on understanding principles of health behaviour by applying a judgement and decision making and strategic interaction perspective to infectious disease control – especially with regard to the vaccination decision and prudent use of antibiotics.”
In other words: Prof. Dr. Betsch is a glorified pollster who studies the attitudes of ordinary people, so that government bureaucrats can figure out how to manipulate them more effectively. She is naturally also a truly odious vaccinator, author of a book called Fact Check: Vaccination (heavens preserve us), and leader of an Orwellian project called Corona Snapshot Monitoring, or COSMO. Under these auspices, she surveys the German population to inquire after “risk perception, protective behaviour and trust” in order to help policymakers devise more insidious policies.
The media has barraged Americans with vaxx propaganda. Most Americans have bought the lie that the vaxxes are needed to, and will, save humanity. Do pro-Vaxxers know any science? Specifically, concerning Coronavirus, how do they not know that this infection does not seriously threaten healthy people under 70, and scarcely threatens people older than that? This has been obvious for 20 months. Yet somehow, most people have bought the fear narrative, believe that everyone is imperiled and that mass scale injections will make a virus crawl into a corner and die. Don’t they know the shots are failing?
The old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger—what danger is there if you don't think of any?—and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally a community, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a–huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead–and–alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Science-shmience. Do you know how I sit the smug cunts talking about how smart they are and how well-versed they are in "the science" right back on their sorry asses? I ask them to explain how a 4-cycle internal combustion engine works. Not a single cunt have been succesfull so far. Yes, I'm riot at parties.
Science-shmience. Do you know how I sit the smug cunts talking about how smart they are and how well-versed they are in "the science" right back on their sorry asses? I ask them to explain how a 4-cycle internal combustion engine works. Not a single cunt have been succesfull so far. Yes, I'm riot at parties.
Those smug cunts may think an ICE is workmen's tech and beneath them, and they have higher academic skills. Even so, they would have trouble explaining Archimedes' Principle, and Archimedes' Principle is clearly "science." They known it involves dunking a crown in water, but then no clue how that act establishes how much of the crown is gold vs silver.
For a while, I was interested in the old vocational videos that used to be given to high school students in the 50's and 60's.
11/17/21
•
COVID › VIEWS
Iversen: Locking Down Unvaccinated-Only ‘Not About Science, It’s About Punishing People’
On the latest episode of The Hill’s “Rising,” journalist and political commentator Kim Iversen discussed strict lockdowns for the unvaccinated only in Austria, and the UK’s new policy requiring three shots as proof of being “fully vaccinated.”
1) upstroke - pulls in gasoline vapor and air mixture
2) downstroke - compress vapor mixture
3) upstroke - ignite fuel mixture just at it starts on the upstroke
4) downstroke - expel burnt air/fuel mixture
The cycles are called intake, compression, power, exhaust.
Writes AlmostWrong’s Newsletter ·13 hr ago
It cannot be ruled out it might be human nature to coerce others to do what you have already done because you feel insecure and underconfident about the possibility that what you have done is right.
If this is true, then forcing others to do things that you've already done might be a way to cope with uncertainty and existential insecurity. This doesn't lower the risk that what one did was wrong, just that you now have everyone on board and cannot take blame singularly.
The cycles are called intake, compression, power, exhaust. Or the mnemonic my edgy High School auto shop teacher gave it:
Suck
Squeeze
Bang
Blow
How did I get that upside down and backwards?
richwicks says
How did I get that upside down and backwards?
Because the crankshaft is on bottom and the piston goes down when it sucks in the gas.
I still think I got it correct? Piston is at the bottom
I always see the piston being below the crankshaft.
Engines are almost never built like that because of the problems of oil on the underside of the piston.
richwicks saysI still think I got it correct? Piston is at the bottom
See if this helps. This is the orientation usually used when describing reciprocating engine cycles.
So it fires every other rotation?
richwicks saysNope, every other.
That's what I said...every other.
I used to think it fired every rotation
Nothing says I’m better than you than donning a mask for no particular reason at all and then posting a photo of it online to demonstrate that virtue!
During Coronamania, many people have validated and internalized others’ Covid fear level, because doing so is seen as "empathetic" and "nice." Some have told me they’re deliberately accommodating others’ fear. Others may be doing so reflexively. I‘m reminded of the Woody Allen movie, Zelig, in which the title character pathologically takes on the personalities of those around him in order to fit in and gain acceptance.
In sports, coaches or commentators sometimes sometimes say a team is “playing down to another team’s level,” i.e., playing poorly and out of synch because that’s what their opponent is doing. But should everyday people dysfunctionally descend into the viral fear abyss of those around them? Empathy isn’t always good; it can be misplaced and damaging. Acting as if Covid fear is rational enables more fear among the fearful. It’s the adult version of affirming that maybe there is a monster under your bed. It’s like buying beer for an alcoholic friend.
As members of this privileged, sheltered class, politicians and bureaucrats have absorbed the virus hysteria that they helped seed in their social milieu. ...
Merkel’s remarkable virus paranoia, quietly acknowledged by the press now for months, explains her fixation on social isolation, closures and curfews as the only acceptable pandemic policies.
She is a 67 year-old sedentary woman who likely suffers from one or more undisclosed health problems. And she is surrounded by other older, unfit government officials, like 73 year-old interior minister Horst Seehofer, who nearly died of a B19 virus infection in 2002, and so has a reason to fear viral infection. For months and months, all of these people have been taking every possible personal precaution – including house-arresting the entire domestic populations of the countries they govern – in the vain hope of escaping Corona.
You could feel their collective relief when the vaccines were rolled out. All of them eagerly accepted vaccination. ...
To the profound disappointment of Merkel and everybody like her, the vaccines have not eradicated Corona. Every day, the prospect of personal infection looms for these people as a new, uncomfortable certainty. Every day, they and the rest of the work-from-home bureaucracy become ever more terrified. The prime minister of Austria is so afraid that he has confined all unvaccinated Austrians to their homes. When asked, he declared that this measure would have no end date. The Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory is terrified. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is terrified.
You know who isn’t terrified right now? Everyone outside these circles. I and many of the people I know have had Corona, and we’re not terrified. Blue-collar workers have mostly been infected, and they’re not terrified. Grocery clerks, nurses, police officers and bus drivers aren’t terrified. All of the terror is at the top, blaring down at us all of the time. All these people know they are going to get sick in the next few months, and they are railing against this reality. ...
All in all, it is the hive-mind that has been vastly more successful at understanding what is going on – not only as far as Corona, but everywhere. This has been obvious now for years. It is even true in my own field, where the official discourse suffers from a pervasive, unoriginal banality, while alternative theories pondered by intelligent outsiders and anonymous Twitter accounts become every day vastly more interesting. The reasons are simple: There are more people involved; the barriers to publishing are lower; nodes that provide bad analysis are easily removed; the thinkers are more thoroughly networked to each other; they gather audiences solely on the basis of their ability; they consider everything, not just the official line.
Meanwhile, it is only official, curated information that is allowed to inform bureaucratic decisions. Products of the hive-mind are deliberately excluded, via gate-keeping mechanisms like peer review and credentialism. All of the terrified Angela Merkels of the world act within an environment of outdated, poor-quality information, all the time. ...
The problem with curated information isn’t just that it is slow, subject to inertia, and produced by insular out-of-touch functionaries. Because the information has political importance, there are incentives everywhere to manipulate and degrade its quality. Bureaucratic actors will lie about what is going on to curry favour, save face or evade blame. What is more, many advisers, analysts and modellers are only in the position of providing analysis in the first place, because we need more women in STEM, or because they tell the Faucis of the world what they want to hear, or because they have the right combination of sociopathy and narrow-mindedness necessary to ascend complex bureaucratic hierarchies.
Corona policies really are as stupid as they look. Politicians and bureaucrats have locked themselves into a sad parody of the film Contagion, and their increasingly unsustainable, erratic behaviour merely reflects their desperation.
The Ideology of Corona Containment
The system of political beliefs and demands that have grown up around mass containment increasingly resemble a novel, malignant ideological system. ...
First-world democracies are anything but systems for channelling the will of the people. Instead, with the rise of mass media and mass society, they have become elaborate consensus-farming operations. Unique in history, they are governing systems that use mass media to call into being the phenomenon of public opinion, which is then shaped by a combination of propaganda and political participation into a tool of governance and consensus in its own right. The majority is thus first acclimated to the agenda of the state, and then deployed to enforce governmental directives and to repress dissidents, the non-compliant and, increasingly, even the disinterested. Corona containment is an obvious product of a system like this, depending as it does on widely distributed consensus policies that are enforced less by the police than by enthusiastic majorities deputised by journalists.
The mainstream media notion that all people were at serious risk from this virus would not have made sense to those who considered real life, directly observed data about how very few people they knew—or knew of—had died with this infection, or how old or unhealthy those who died already were. Passing your local hospital would not have revealed lines of people laying on stretchers on the sidewalk. People should have noticed that people they knew had tested positive without manifesting serious symptoms. Multiple recent infections among the “vaccinated” people they know should reveal that the vaxxes have been badly oversold.
https://markoshinskie8de.substack.com/p/bus-rides-boxers-and-covid-myth-busters
The mainstream media notion that all people were at serious risk from this virus would not have made sense to those who considered real life, directly observed data about how very few people they knew—or knew of—had died with this infection, or how old or unhealthy those who died already were. Passing your local hospital would not have revealed lines of people laying on stretchers on the sidewalk. People should have noticed that people they knew had tested positive without manifesting serious symptoms. Multiple recent infections among the “vaccinated” people they know should reveal that the vaxxes have been badly oversold.
DECEMBER 1, 2021
An ‘Abundance of Caution’ Mentality Leads to Tyranny
Our public officials are pathologically incapable of humility.
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Liberals defend their credentials which allow them to exploit those who don't have the same credentials. Credentials create monopolies, the ability to set high prices regardless of quality of service. It is a way to defeat free market competition.
The funding of universities depends entirely on the demand for their degrees, which they control. Their biggest horror would be a system where anyone could take tests to prove competence in a subject without paying for the years of classes and subjecting themselves to obedience to professors.
- Thomas Frank
Most of academia is less about learning than about paying for a paper proof of status and conformity. Non-conformists are expelled from schools, or failed out. Most teachers do not like their authority to be questioned. Bosses like the academic proof of conformity when they hire. The most "educated" are the most obedient.
Trump was a threat to their credentials and therefore a threat to their incomes and status.
The academic elite need a reason to hate those threatening themselves, therefore they use imaginary "racism", to which there is no defense. The accusation is the conviction.
Then they don't need to worry about the real class problem, which is independent of race. They would be uncomfortable looking at class, because they'd have to look at themselves and their unearned class privileges.
So their faith in the injection is faith in the "expert class" of which they are members, and they demand that the hoi polloi submit to it as an expression of the elite's power and prestige.