patrick.net

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

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

This is deeply intoxicating.

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

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

The role of behavioral psychology in the iatrogenocide

Pharma weaponized belonging against us.

Pharma weaponized parents’ love for their children against us.

Pharma weaponized our deep respect for science against us.

Pharma weaponized normalcy bias against us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks HeadSet

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

My Speech at the U.S. Senate

MATTIAS DESMET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belonging

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

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

A tragedy disguised as a farce

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

Universal truths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet for many people forgetting that this ever happened is mandatory. Criminals cannot be held accountable. The records must be destroyed.

Some days ago I was video chatting with a friend of mine who was born in Italy, but who has family in California. She made a green card for America in 2022 and is currently living in San Diego. In her case I knew that she must have taken the Covid jabs to come to America. We talked about anything and everything unrelated for a few hours. I told her about my upcoming trip to Thailand and my woes in getting my husband a visa to come to the USA. She seemed curious and skeptical at some point in my talking. There must be something really wrong for it to be taking this long. Finally I came out and said it.

“They require the Covid vaccines for him to come. I think those things are dangerous and should be banned.”

This made her nervous like I’d just ripped off some duct tape on her mouth. “Well you have to take those! I got them and I’m perfectly fine!” Somehow we’ve normalized the idea that they can inject anything at any time and that’s just the way life is. I could tell she didn’t want to think about it anymore than a woman likes to recall being raped.

I explained that I knew many people who took the %$##@$% jabs who seemed perfectly fine, but that this alone does not justify playing Russian roulette with other people’s bodies. The conversation ended nervously not too long afterwards. One side is trying to hold the criminals to account and to make sure we never forget. The other side is desperate to move on from it. They don’t even want to think about it. Too many were complicit.

Too many were complicit.