(06.09.2022)
Archiv: nonconformity / conformity / collectivism
There’s a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented the term ‚conspiracy theory‘ – here’s why
(March 16, 2020)
One may find the CIA’s attempt to influence public opinion problematic. But there is not a single sentence in the document that indicates the CIA intended to weaponise, let alone introduce the term “conspiracy theory” to disqualify criticism. In fact, “conspiracy theory” in the singular is never used in the document. “Conspiracy theories” in the plural is only used once, matter-of-factly in the third paragraph:
Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organisation, for example, by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us.
Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics
(2005)
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.
Meanwhile on Russian state TV: Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechen detachment „Akhmat,“ tells state TV host Olga Skabeeva that Russian forces in Ukraine are fighting „holy war“ against the LGBT & the Antichrist. He hopes Russia will soon face off with NATO.
More genocidal rhetoric on Russian state TV: hosts and pundits repeatedly assert that Ukraine no longer exists, Ukrainians who refuse to see themselves as Russians and fight back against the invasion are described as Nazis and compared to insects (bugs, worms).
Here’s an example:
She Signed an Open Letter Calling for Peace. Then Got Fired.
“I didn’t waver over signing it and I don’t regret it. But I didn’t expect that it would result in forced dismissal,” Dolinina said in an interview.
“I knew, as somebody working in a cultural institute connected to the government, that if I was detained at a protest or posted something aggressive on social media I could get fired. But I never guessed it would happen for signing an open letter calling for peace.”
“But that’s a sign of the new world we’re all living in now.”
Here’s what the climate is producing toward any American who is even slightly off-key or mildly questioning the unified script. If you think this is healthy, I think you ought to re-consider that.
Thinking Like a Tyrant
Something that is slowing down many people from fully grasping what is upon us, is that they are making mistakes in their reasoning about events, because they are engaged, naturally enough, in what intelligence analysts call “mirror imaging.” That is, because most of us are decent people with basic compassion at our cores, and are not sociopaths or psychopaths, we tend to “mirror image” in assuming that others are also driven by basic human motivations such as empathy, altruism, and kindness — or even just by the basic notion that other human beings are also deserving of life, self-determination and dignity. How can such brutality be imposed on us? How could others be at the helm of such vicious policies?
But this assumption, that those currently influencing events and making certain key decisions, are “like us” — is a fatal error.
The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West
That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.
But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
In The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Philip Zimbardo theorizes that people discount situational influences when judging the actions of others. In particular, he recounts in detail the events of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), which he designed and directed: He replicated a prison block in a Stanford building and assigned male undergraduate volunteers to act the part of guards and prisoners.
The experiment, which was originally planned for two weeks, grew so dangerously out of control that Zimbardo was forced to shut it down after less than a week.
Drawing on his experience as an expert witness for the court-martial hearings on Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo presents a body of research evidence to suggest that the military as well as the Bush administration fostered a situation that turned ordinary soldiers into torturers and abusers. Zimbardo also suggests, however, that the power of situations can be used to promote good behavior and turn ordinary people into heroes. The Lucifer Effect is at times unbalanced and disjointed but well worth reading to remind us that where we are may affect us as much as who we are.
Is it Time for Intellectuals to Talk about God?
I have seen bad politics all of my life and this drama unfolding around us goes beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This — this is scary, metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness has the tinge of the pure, elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it is the same nasty glamour that surrounds Leni Riefenstahl films.
In short, I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.
MASS PSYCHOSIS – How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL
This video was made in collaboration with Academy of Ideas. They create videos explaining the ideas of history’s great thinkers in order to help supply the world with more knowledge, to empower the individual, and to promote freedom.
MASS PSYCHOSIS – How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL
This video was made in collaboration with Academy of Ideas. They create videos explaining the ideas of history’s great thinkers in order to help supply the world with more knowledge, to empower the individual, and to promote freedom.
Belief in conspiracy theories and overconfidence are two tendencies linked to hasty thinking.
The fear of coronavirus is changing our psychology
(2nd April 2020)
For weeks, almost every newspaper has stories about the coronavirus pandemic on its front page; radio and TV programmes have back-to-back coverage on the latest death tolls; and depending on who you follow, social media platforms are filled with frightening statistics, practical advice or gallows humour.
As others have already reported, this constant bombardment can result in heightened anxiety, with immediate effects on our mental health. But the constant feeling of threat may have other, more insidious, effects on our psychology. Due to some deeply evolved responses to disease, fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity.
Transformation: The collective psychology of coronavirus
(17 March 2020)
All this makes me think about the stuff I’ve been working on over the last couple of years in the Collective Psychology Project (CPP), which I set up in 2018 – and in particular the importance of whether we respond to perceived threats by going into fight-or-flight or tend-and-befriend mode.
Fight-or-flight – or more accurately, fight / flight / freeze – is a natural reaction to threat or feelings of overwhelm. But it’s not particularly helpful in the face of a collective threat like coronavirus. It’s a primal response, not a considered one. It focuses on the interests of the individual, not the collective.
The ‚zombification‘ of married life
Married couples are “zombifying,” is the magazine’s melancholy conclusion. Instead of divorcing, as they once might have, they grimly endure each other. It’s better, or seems so, than the foreseeable alternatives – prominent among them financial insecurity amid declining wages and emotional insecurity as the lingering COVID-19 crisis corrodes the strength to face the world alone.
There are no doubt many reasons why marriage, so hopefully embarked upon, so quickly turns sour for so many. Spa! zeroes in on one – the double-income household.
1932–1945: Doctors & Academics Perverted Medicine & Science in Nazi Germany
(November 18, 2014)
“Three of its institutes that were beneficiaries of the Rockefeller Foundation [K-W Psychiatry (Munich); K-W Brain Research (Berlin-Buch); K-W Anthropology, Genetics, Eugenics (Berlin-Dahlem)] played an important role in the development, implementation and exploitation of the racial programs of the Third Reich including murderous experiments and the exploitation of the dead. Kaiser-Wilhelm scientists joined with the Nazi state in pursuit of the goal of improving the people’s health (Volksgesundheit), the major emphasis being on eugenic and racial purification.
The resulting collaboration between science and the Nazi state not only legitimized the policies and programs of the Hitler regime but it resulted in the exploitation and mutilation and murder of untold thousands of innocent victims by physicians and scientists associated with some of the world’s leading universities and research institutes. The participation of scientists associated with the Kaiser-Wilhelm Society enhanced the credibility of the Nazi state’s program of scientific terror and murder.”
The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics
If you were surprised to see the ACLU heralding the civil liberties imperatives of „vaccine mandates” and „vaccine requirements” — whereby the government coerces adults to inject medicine into their own bodies that they do not want — the New York Times op-ed which the group promoted, written by two of its senior lawyers, was even more extreme. The article begins with this rhetorical question: “Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties?” Noting that „some who have refused vaccination claim as much,” the ACLU lawyers say: “we disagree.” The op-ed then examines various civil liberties objections to mandates and state coercion — little things like, you know, bodily autonomy and freedom to choose — and the ACLU officials then invoke one authoritarian cliche after the next (“these rights are not absolute“) to sweep aside such civil liberties concerns:
This is a very smart and insightful article on why groupthink is so pervasive among corporate journalists — especially those online — and why both the miserable economics and miserable culture of the media corporations where they work require conformity and herd behavior:
The Problem With Media
This is the tragedy. The local news die-off is real and lasting. Whole regions of the country now lack reliable news. The suffering is not always obvious because it is more about absence than outright destruction. Today’s 28-year-old living in an exurb doesn’t understand how much coverage of a town meeting, a county executive’s office, or a public school they would’ve read 20 or 30 years ago. They merely see nothing and learn to live with it. Many of the remaining small newspapers hardly function at all; they are living ghosts printing wire copy.
Nobel Lecture by Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture was pre-recorded, and shown on video on 7 December 2005, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
The free-speech crisis is not a right-wing myth
Too many on what passes for the left today are keen to dismiss the free-speech crisis in universities as a ‘right-wing myth’. They brush off the countless examples of censorship as overhyped. And they ignore concerns about the moral policing of dissenting views.
In short, they effectively deny that a free-speech crisis exists. And they do so by attacking those who are sounding the alarm. As far as these deniers are concerned, the problem is not cancel culture; it is those dishonest myth-makers who are drawing attention to it.
MARY ELLEN SYNON: Why the roots of the EU’s vaccine catastrophe lie in Merkel’s shadowy past in Communist East Germany
As a young woman, Merkel was taught to believe in a Soviet system that folded 15 republics into a single state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the past few months, she has sacrificed all prospects of rapid vaccination – and the lives it would save – for her own population because of her dogmatic belief in folding 27 countries into a single state called the European Union.
As Filipp Piatov, head of opinion at the German newspaper Bild, wrote last week, even in such a vital matter Merkel preferred ideology to good politics – because she was ‘so eager to demonstrate the superiority of Brussels bureaucracy to the nation state’.
Be a nonconformist.
The totalitarian hell of lockdown
Debate, dissent and independent thought are not allowed in Covid Britain.
Freedom of expression fears grow as tough new Ofcom code classes ‚political opinion‘ in its definition of hate speech
(04.01.2021)
Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith said: ‚We are drifting into a totalitarian ‚woke‘ state where nothing can ever be said for fear that somebody will be offended. It’s madness, and it’s driven by a small minority. Most people don’t care.‘
It’s the pro-lockdown lobby that is spreading fake news
This is the stage of lockdown authoritarianism we have now reached: anyone who questions the lockdown will be branded a liar and a hoodwinker who should be expelled from public life, while the cheerers of lockdown, those self-styled saviours of lives, can say whatever they want with very few repercussions.
Der Untertan [The Subject]
This poster advertises the novel ‘Der Untertan’ (‘The Subject’) by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), the first part of his trilogy, ‘Das Kaiserreich’ (‘The Empire’). The novel was banned in Germany during the First World War, owing to its criticism of the militarism and conservatism prevalent in Imperial German society. It was finally published, to much acclaim, in 1918. Heinrich’s younger brother, the novelist Thomas Mann, initially wrote in support of the war but later agreed with Heinrich. Both brothers left for America in the 1930s following the rise of the Nazis.
The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny
Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny — because they do not perceive — that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms — of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process — because they have rendered their own speech and activism, if it exists at all, so innocuous that nobody with the capacity to do so would bother to try to curtail it. The observation apocryphally attributed to socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned for her opposition to German involvement in World War I and then summarily executed by the state, expresses it best: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
Der Untertan [The Subject]
This poster advertises the novel ‘Der Untertan’ (‘The Subject’) by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), the first part of his trilogy, ‘Das Kaiserreich’ (‘The Empire’). The novel was banned in Germany during the First World War, owing to its criticism of the militarism and conservatism prevalent in Imperial German society. It was finally published, to much acclaim, in 1918. Heinrich’s younger brother, the novelist Thomas Mann, initially wrote in support of the war but later agreed with Heinrich. Both brothers left for America in the 1930s following the rise of the Nazis.
Imagine if these imbeciles directed this energy at someone with actual political power rather than some random lady. Like… what the fuck are they thinking?
Poll: 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share
(22.06.2020)
A new Cato national survey finds that self‐censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. The share of Americans who self‐censor has risen several points since 2017 when 58% of Americans agreed with this statement.
Der Untertan [The Subject]
This poster advertises the novel ‘Der Untertan’ (‘The Subject’) by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), the first part of his trilogy, ‘Das Kaiserreich’ (‘The Empire’). The novel was banned in Germany during the First World War, owing to its criticism of the militarism and conservatism prevalent in Imperial German society. It was finally published, to much acclaim, in 1918. Heinrich’s younger brother, the novelist Thomas Mann, initially wrote in support of the war but later agreed with Heinrich. Both brothers left for America in the 1930s following the rise of the Nazis.
Twitter mob: College researcher forced to resign after study finding no racial bias in police shootings
And while 800 people supported a petition to fire him, more than 2,000 backed him with their signatures, including top academics such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker, as well as MSU professors who said there is “zero concrete evidence that Hsu has performed his duties as VP in an unfair or biased manner.”
“Therefore, removing Hsu from his post as VP would be to capitulate to rumor and character assassination,” the petition said.
Donald Trump Speech Transcript at Mount Rushmore 4th of July Event
One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.
This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty must be stopped and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children from this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.
Trump Flouts Virus Rules, Warns Of ‚New Far-Left Fascism‘ In Speech Ahead Of July 4th
„They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,“ he said. „But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.“
In response, the crowd erupted in cheers of „USA! USA!“ and „Four more years!“
So…Why Hasn’t There Been A COVID Spike From The Protests?
(24.06.2020)
The problem with masks, Hassig said, is the psychological element.
She called it a “normative behavior” much like littering.
UN recruits an army of social media coronavirus “misinformation” correctors
The fight against COVID-19 misinformation will be “long-term, without a clear end in sight,” according to Fleming.
Der Untertan [The Subject]
This poster advertises the novel ‘Der Untertan’ (‘The Subject’) by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), the first part of his trilogy, ‘Das Kaiserreich’ (‘The Empire’). The novel was banned in Germany during the First World War, owing to its criticism of the militarism and conservatism prevalent in Imperial German society. It was finally published, to much acclaim, in 1918. Heinrich’s younger brother, the novelist Thomas Mann, initially wrote in support of the war but later agreed with Heinrich. Both brothers left for America in the 1930s following the rise of the Nazis.
Neither Israel’s nor Germany’s Slide Into Fascism Was Accidental
It would be a mistake to see this degeneration as a necessary, let alone inevitable, evil. It is the realization of merely one potential, however central, of identity in a national context. It is neither ordained by heaven nor a divine law. It is a choice, and one that ought to be changed.
One of the things you learn after a couple of decades of political activity on the Left is that many who claim to be passionate supporters of freedom of expression don’t really mean it.
How to fight the new fascism
Moreover, identitarians on both the left and the right see human beings only through the prism of race, gender or sexuality, and fail to account for the primacy of the individual. As such, they are in direct opposition to the principles of Martin Luther King, who valued the content of one’s character over the colour of one’s skin. While collectivist rhetoric from the racist far right is easy enough to dismiss, it is far more difficult when it comes from those who claim to be advancing a progressive agenda.