Category Archives: Morality

Only When We Know What Propaganda Is, And How It Works, Will We Be Free to Live Our Lives and Rule Ourselves, by Klark Barnes

Very few people realize how extensive the effort is to indoctrinate them. From Klark Barnes at earlking56.family.blog:

For those of us who study propaganda critically, and seek to do this all-important work as public intellectuals, these last two years have been uniquely challenging, and even dangerous, forcing us into a painful double bind.

On the one hand, we have never had so much to work with, nor has there ever been a greater need for our peculiar expertise. Whereas in the “democratic” West, propaganda used to be most evident as an intensive episodic practice, flaring up in wartime, in political campaigns and following immense state crimes like JFK’s assassination, 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks (among other national traumas engineered by governments), the propaganda blasting all of us non-stop today is no longer national, or merely multinational, but global; and the former intermittency of those most awful crises, with decades going by between one trauma and the next, has given way to a mind-numbing strategy of serial bombardment — one cataclysmic fuss after another (with, sometimes, one within another), as under openly totalitarian rule.]

Thus, throughout 2020 — Year One of the now-endless Covid crisis — we were inescapably suffused with terror of “the virus,” and thereby bullied into locking down (despite the scientific fact that lockdowns do more harm than good), while also masking all the time, and everywhere, and “social-distancing” as well (despite the scientific fact that neither practice “slows the spread” of any respiratory virus). While masking was imposed, ostensibly, to make us less afraid of Covid-19, it only made us more afraid of one another, and so compounded that disabling fear with a ferocious anger at all those not wearing masks (despite the scientific fact that masks would not prevent transmission of “the virus” even if the entire global population wore them all the time).

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Wallowing in Welfare-Warfare State Prison, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Lots of people gladly trade their freedom for some form of security. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

A reader recently sent me an email pointing out that many ex-convicts commit new crimes with the intent of being sent back to prison. They actually feel more comfortable in prison than they do in the outside world.

This phenomenon shouldn’t surprise us. In prison, the state takes care of prisoners and, by and large, keeps them safe. It provides their food, healthcare, and clothing. In some prisons, prisoners are even given a paying job. Much of the time, prisoners are free to lie around, relaxing in their cells or watching television. Sometimes prisoners are even provided a formal education. And the best part is that all of this is free.

In other words, with prison the state provides you with security. In the minds of some convicts, that’s a lot better than freedom. When the state casts convicts out of prison, they become responsible for themselves and their well-being. That’s not easy. They need money to buy food, housing, a car, and other things. That means finding and keeping a job. Moreover, outside prison they are faced with an array of choices on a daily basis, which contributes to their anxiety. Better to trade liberty for security.

The reason that this phenomenon shouldn’t surprise us is that this is no different from what the American people have done with their adoption of a welfare-warfare state way of life. They have traded their liberty for security — or at least what they are convinced is security.

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US Officials Concern Troll About World Press Freedoms While Assaulting Them, by Caitlin Johnstone

This is putrid, rank hypocrisy. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

I will never get used to living in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.

Just today US State Department spokesman and CIA veteran Ned Price tweeted disapprovingly about the Kyrgyz Republic’s decision to deport investigative journalist Bolot Temirov to Russia, where press freedom groups are concerned that the Russian citizen could face conscription to fight in Ukraine.

“Dismayed by the decision to deport journalist Bolot Temirov from the Kyrgyz Republic,” said Price. “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job. The Kyrgyz Republic has been known for its vibrant civil society — attempts to stifle freedom of expression stain that reputation.”

This would be an entirely reasonable statement for anyone else to make. If you said it or I said it, it would be completely legitimate. But when Ned says it, it is illegitimate.

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Zelensky, media lackeys caught in most dangerous lie yet, by Alexander Rubinstein

As lies go this one was world-class. It could have started World War III. From Alexander Rubinstein at thegrayzone.com:

With Kiev exposed for a lie that could have triggered a third world war, it is time to examine past deceptions that Western media promoted.

A missile that exploded on Polish soil on November 15 killed two civilians and destroyed farm equipment. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Western corporate media rushed to blame the explosion on Russia in apparent hopes of triggering NATO’s Article 5, which requires NATO states to defend one another militarily when attacked by a hostile force.

Polish and NATO members including US President Joseph Biden have since confirmed the missile that struck Poland was, in fact, a Ukrainian S-300 anti-aircraft missile. Yet Zelensky is sticking to his line, blaming Russia for the strike, while NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg still insists that “Russia bears ultimate responsibility.” Meanwhile, the media outlets that reflexively pointed the finger at Russia have been forced to take a step back from their initial reporting.

“Russian missiles hit Poland, the territory of our friendly country. People died,” Zelensky insisted on November 15, the night of the attack. “The longer Russia feels impunity, the more threats there will be to anyone within reach of Russian missiles. To fire missiles at NATO territory! This is a Russian missile attack on collective security! This is a very significant escalation. We must act.”

Zelensky held firm the following day, despite mounting evidence that his own country’s air defenses were responsible, declaring “I have no doubt that this is not our missile… I believe that this was a Russian missile, based on our military reports.” By this time, most analysts rejected the Ukrainian president’s assessment, including the founder of the US government-sponsored intelligence cutout Bellingcat, who wrote “At this point I think it’s fair anyone saying that a Russian missile hit Poland based on the current evidence is being irresponsible.”

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Corruption and Evil Wear On You After Awhile

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h/t The Burning Platform

The Age of Dangerous Charlatans, by Stephen Karganovic

Musk and Gates are emblematic of a class of billionaires who believe their wealth and presumed expertise entitles them to run everyone else’s life. From Stephen Karganovic at strategic-culture.org:

After losing its moral and spiritual compass, Western humanity will be hard put to avoid ruin if it continues to follow the dangerous charlatans.

Elon Musk, the prominent enfant terrible of the globalist set, never ceases to astonish. At the recent G20 business forum in Indonesia, prompted by no apparent motive related to the gathering, he declared that “maybe we will find alien civilisations or discover civilisations that existed millions of years ago.” The bizarre announcement was delivered in a suitably mystical atmosphere, including an occult crystal bowl situated in the forefront, with Musk sitting in the dark, wearing a traditional Indonesian batik shirt and surrounded by candles as he offered a “vision” for the future that in addition to aliens also included deep tunnels and rocket tourism.

There is no record of anyone in attendance asking Musk the obvious question: what qualifies him to speculate on these subjects? There is meagre information about Musk’s education and accomplishments, if we exclude the widely known fact of his sudden, inexplicable, and spectacular enrichment, on a par with similar “success stories” involving the emergence of magnates “out-of-nowhere” in 1990s Russia.

The scant available biographical data about Musk include such titbits of budding genius as creating a video game at the tender age of 12. As for actual education, it is said that in 1997 Musk received bachelor’s degrees “in physics and economics” from the University of Pennsylvania. The eclectic scholar Musk subsequently enrolled at Stanford to pursue graduate studies in physics, which he abandoned after only two days in residence because “he felt that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics.”

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Should Individualism be Medicated Away to be Replaced by “Welfarism?” by Igor Chudov

This sounds so horrifyingly bizarre as to be out of the realm of possibility, but a few years ago so did lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, and vaccine passports. From Igor Chudov at igorchudov.substack.com:

WEF: “Moral Bioenhancement” Pills to Bring Collectivist Future

Medical ethics is a large field of study. The Covid pandemic certainly brought many medical ethics issues to the forefront and produced rather amazing “ethicist” gems, such as this:

Be aware that “bioethics” has moved on to proposals that might seem crazy to you but are considered seriously and published in Bill Gates-funded publications and scientific journals. Important studies on this subject are conducted under the auspices of the World Economic Forum.

Forcibly giving people collectivism-promoting “Morality Pills” (archive link) is a popular suggestion among bioethicists. It was published in Bill Gates-funded The Conversation and is discussed widely in scientific literature. (The Conversation received 7 million dollars from Bill Gates but pretends to be an independent journalism publication)

What are these morality pills? You might think that morality, to them, means being a good husband or wife, an honest businessperson, fulfilling promises, and so on. Why not enhance that? What’s the problem?

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Evil or Stupid? By Baron Bodissey

Republicans talk a good game, but that’s all it is—talk. Cut through the bullshit and they just want their place at the trough. From Baron Bodissey at gatesofvienna.net:

h/t WRSA

Last week, in one of our Skype groups, a non-American participant said:

I’ve seen this quote: “The US has two parties: the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.” Is it any wonder the stupid party is losing a** over teacup over and over again?

I replied:

I understand the sentiment, but it’s worse than that. The Republicans are also evil, but pretend to be stupid. They don’t need to win elections to reach their goals; they just need the system that rewards and enriches them to remain in place and stable. They get just as rich when they’re the opposition.

They have to pretend that they hold conservative principles and want to win elections, but it’s all a charade. Any Republican who intends to move up in the hierarchy has to forget all that. In the end, it’s about money and power and perks and getting laid (whether hookers, rent boys, or little kids).

All the rest of it is pretense.

It’s very demoralizing to realize what’s going on. But once you start seeing this stuff, you can’t go back to not seeing it.

It took me a long time to reach this cynical position. I wanted to believe that the Republican Party presented a viable opposition, and for many years I resisted the nagging sense that the whole thing was a charade. Even after I came to loathe Republicans, I still clung to the forlorn hope that the party could somehow overcome its deficiencies and mount a real challenge to Democrat hegemony.

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adverse results from adverse selection, from el gato malo

How do you deal with the people in your life who were so terribly wrong about Covid and its vaccines, but insisted on telling you what you had to do? From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

navigating our way out of the outrage economy

as is the habit of anthropomorphic animals, long time gatopal™ kbirb and i were having a bit of a chat the other day.

he asked an interesting question:

indeed, it does seem as though the collective consciousness is moving away from outrage on the manyfold ills of covid response and save for the last few zealots still howling for masks and covalent vaccines and pretending we still need “an emergency” it’s pretty much over in terms of current oppressions.

at least for now.

a massive number have changed jerseys and now pretend they were the good guys all along and not the ones vilifying their neighbors, seeking to make them second class citizens and subject to arbitrary discrimination and detention in the name of pseudosafety pseudoscience.

and by and large, they ae getting away with it.

some are still angry and deeply wary (and with good reason) but most of the middle just seems ready to move on.

because that’s what people do.

they don’t really react to the abstractions of what’s coming.

and they cannot hold onto outrages too far past.

“it’s true, it’s true, it’s true, it never happened” is just another variant of the classic “deny, deny, deny, it’s old news” and so too is “this is outrageous, this is outrageous, this is outrageous, this is normal.”

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The Solemn Stillness Before Winter, by James Howard Kunstler

All sorts of shit looks ready to hit the fan this winter. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“Ultimately, the Democratic Party is a criminal organization; and to support it is to be a criminal. And since it is the ruling party, unless you oppose it, you support it.” —Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror

Here in New England now, the landscape is putting itself to bed, preparing for winter’s long sleep. The grass in the cow pastures never looks greener than in contrast to the barren trees, but that lingering color, too, will soon fade. We did not get smacked here by the deep snows of far-off Buffalo, not a flake, so a sweetly solemn stillness settles over these tender hills as we give vague thanks at Thursday’s gala of gluttony, certain to induce terrors of indigestion in the restless night to come.

I am thankful to still be here after all these years — more than that, grateful! And with the prospect of seeing what comes next: the beginning of a great correction for a country gone off the rails in greed, bad faith, and treachery. Everything rooted in lies and fakery is primed to blow down in the political storms ahead.

It’s fitting that the last straw on this beast’s back was the phoniest scam of all, and saturated with every known sort of millennial Woke posturing: the FTX swindle. Its avatar, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), proved to be a special species of villain, the idiot-savant slob, clever enough to somehow winkle a physics degree out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but not very good with the basic math of money — for instance, the equation that margin must equal collateral — and really really bad at covering his oafish tracks.

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