There is a Hollywood plot where a troubled ventriloquist either begins to think his dummy is real or the dummy has actually come to life. The dummy then begins to direct the ventriloquist to do terrible things like kill people. Another take on this is where actors in some sort of fantasy performance get sucked into what appears to be a real life version of the fantasy world. The underlying premise is that playing make believe for too long causes one to lose his grasp of reality.
There is some truth to this concern for unreality. Extremely rich or famous people often cut themselves off from the world. In the case of the rich guy, it simply becomes a haven from the hassles of the real world. For the famous person it is the one place they are free of the fans. Over time they become increasing detached from reality or overindulge in drugs and alcohol. Howard Hughes is the famous rich guy example, while Elvis and Michael Jackson are famous people examples.
The French Revolution provides a more general example. The king was certainly divorced from reality, while clearly not insane. His actions were rational, based on the rules of the world in which he lived. The same can be said for the aristocracy that was competing with him for power. The trouble is that world was separate from the reality of France at the time. The Ancien Régime was operating in an unreality, based in rules that were quickly being washed away by events.
Of course, the comparison between this age and that age is common on this side of the great divide because of the general weirdness of the managerial class. Normal people, regardless of their income, are concerned with things like rising prices and the dramatic spike in violent crime. Meanwhile, the people running for office are telling you that their penis is imaginary and climate change is our greatest challenge. “Let them eat cake” sounds reasonable in comparison.
What is not well known or at least not discussed in the history books, is if the Ancien Régime invested a lot of time in story telling. That is, did they spend their days spinning tales that confirmed their version of reality? Were there people responsible for telling the important people that the peasants were running out of steam and soon they would fall back in line? Did the official information guy at court tell everyone that the unrest in the countryside was transitory?
It sounds ridiculous but look around the mass media. So much of what passes for the news is just a form of wish-casting. The stories, opinions and analysis are all designed to buck up the ruling class in the face of disconfirmation. When inflation began to rage, they were falling all over themselves to preach the gospel of transitory. It was obviously ridiculous but they wanted to believe it, so everyone in the managerial class put on the transitory face and explained how it was all transitory.
The last two years has been an elaborate game of Covid charades. It seems like a million years ago, but at the start they were claiming the hospitals were overrun and people were dropping dead in the street. None of that was true. In fact, the opposite of that was true with regards to hospitals. We wrecked our medical system because the managerial class believed the scary stories they were telling one another. In retrospect, the whole thing was a deadly and expensive farce.
We are seeing a replay of this with the Ukraine. For close to a year the media has been brewing up one whopper after another about the war. A batch of fake stories are released about Ukrainian babushkas destroying Russian tanks with household products and Western capitals erupt in celebration. According to the storytellers, Russia has been running out of missiles since February. The whole thing looks like a deranged game of make believe to console the managerial class.
This is not a new phenomenon. Way back in the Obama years, the Democrats passed a big spending bill to fund “shovel ready projects.” That was in the winter and by spring they had all the stuff ready for a big party called the summer of recovery. They expected to have Obama roam the countryside, standing in front of construction sites for new bridges while he talked about his great polices. Their narrative said he would be the new FDR, along with the new Lincoln and new Jesus.
They were so sure their stories were true they spent tens of millions on materials for the expected rallies. Things like signs and t-shirts with the “Summer of Recovery” printed on them in Team Obama colors. They were using the slogan into the early summer, despite the reality on the ground. It was as if they thought they could will their preferred version of reality into existence if they just pretended it was happening. The script said it would happen, so it was going to happen.
This has been the pattern for a long time now. Someone in the managerial class creates a pleasing narrative. It catches on and before long everyone is repeating the pleasing narrative in public. Experts are brought in to explain why this pleasing narrative is realty and then other experts are brought in to present proof. It is as if they think that once everyone agrees that the pleasing narrative is reality, then reality has no choice but to submit to the new moral consensus.
Again, Ukraine provides examples. A month ago, the Ukrainians launched a series of counter offensives. The mass media was instantly full of stories about how the Russian army was collapsing and the Ukrainians would soon be in Moscow. Retired generals were brought in to confirm the story. Analysts with funny names wrote columns about how the war has turned decisively against Russia. Everyone was sure it had to be true because they believed it was true.
Getting back to that old Hollywood plot, the managerial class seems to be in a pattern where they create a fantasy and then the fantasy convinces them it is real. Like the ventriloquist who believes his dummy has come to life, the narrative makers seem to be sure their alternative reality is more real than reality. They have come to believe that a good narrative is something like an incantation. If it is repeated enough, the narrative bends reality to fit the plot line of the narrative.
The assumption is that the endless telling of whoppers is to shape public opinion, but that is just a story normal people want to believe. No one in charge gives a tinker’s damn what the people think about anything. There is no evidence that public opinion has any impact on public policy. After the next election, all of those new faces in office will melt away revealing the same old faces behind them. Public opinion will have changed nothing about Washington.
A better reason for the explosion of narrative realty in the managerial class is that this is how the managerial elite controls the system. The people with complicated titles and inscrutable qualifications control the vast leviathan that is the modern managerial state using tales of what lies just over the horizon. The millions in the system, like ants in a colony, response and act accordingly. The leviathan moves in the desired direction with the help of a million administrative hands.
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So what you’re saying is, is Santa Claus isn’t real.
Boy, the kids are sure gonna be disappointed.
6
Santa Claus is more believable than some of the bullshit coming out of Washington these days.
5
Zman, you forgot to include one of your best lines and one I find myself repeating quite often these days: The definition of reality is, that thing that doesn’t go away even when you stop believing in it.
7
You can ignore reality but you can’t avoid the consequences of ignoring reality. Ayn Rand
Noted many times in human history.
5
“There is no evidence that public opinion has any impact on public policy.”
That right there is some of TheZmans greatest work.
50 years of politics in the US in a single sentence.
1
I’ve been fumbling around with a theory of the “bicameral mind” to explain Our Betters in the managerial class. From Julian Jaynes, obviously, but also from a philosopher named Norman Fingarette, who wrote a book called Self-Deception in which he argues IIRC for something like that — a “split brain” that can hide itself from itself, since after all self-deception shouldn’t be possible. But it happens, obviously, just as it’s obvious that these people do know, on some level.
I saw it all the time in academia. One of the places I taught was this cute little college town in the middle of nowhere. Very nice, very clean, very safe… so, of course, very White, and that had to go, so the faculty pressured the city council into importing every ghetto banger they could catch from the nearest major metro (it probably helped that some of them were good at football, though they’d never admit it). So the usual happened, except this time, some townies got what they thought would be sweet revenge — they rezoned the schools in the faculty ghetto to pull from the new ghetto ghetto.
White flight? At about Mach f*cking three, my friends. It didn’t take but one or two cases of their kids being beaten up and robbed for their lunch money. But you know what happened next — all the professors moved to the very Whitest school district they could find… and immediately started decrying the lack of Diversity.
They know. It’s impossible that they don’t know, as evidenced by their actions. And yet, their actions make it just as obvious that they really don’t know, too. I hesitate to attribute some kind of weird brain defect to something like 35% of the population, but all other explanations fail.
23
Isn’t this describing cognitive dissonance?
3
In a way. But cognitive dissonance is supposed to bother people. It’s supposed to cause tremendous unconscious stress. These people aren’t bothered in the slightest. It doesn’t even register. That old crack about how they talk like MLK but live like the KKK is literally true, except not only does that not bother them, it never even registers — consciously or (seemingly) unconsciously.
4
This is why liberalism can be classified as a religious dogma. Its also why science advances one funeral at a time. We need to wait for these people to die while dispersing our message for the next generation.
1
Mania indicates stress. It’s why I distrust true believers, anyone claiming to have The Answer. Even myself when I have a breakthrough on some problem, or get worked up about something.
I’d argue the ‘bicameral mind’ is reason and emotion, like a rider and a horse. If you’re freaked out by the horse, he’ll throw you, if you aren’t, he’ll let you ride him— and you can cover more ground.
Likewise with emotions. They’re natural, they happen. If you gain control of them, you can go far; if not, you’re a wreck and a wrecker. If you overcome them like a buddha, you’re left walking.
My unsolicited two cents, at any rate.
Yes. Which has really nothing to do with Jaynes’s book and theory.
Good to quote those, and bring them to attention, but not when they are off-topic.
1
You are confusing “don’t know” with “don’t care”. It’s a common problem of good people to conflate the two. That’s what happens when good folks do nothing to stop evil.
3
It would be shocking if it were as low as 35 percent.
That’s close to the exact script from an early Paul Ramsey (Ramzpaul) video. I’ve given it to people who got quite far into it before realizing it was parody. Reality has overcome its parodic nature.
https://youtu.be/p8_IWE7_aCw
“[H]ospitals were overrun and people were dropping dead in the street.”
Now they’re dropping dead on stage and on soccer fields.
16
And now they’re publishing stories in the news trying to sell the idea it’s always been normal for young people to get myocarditis, when in fact it’s been very rare.
15
Consider all the people who must be in on the lie to a greater or lesser degree.
As a quick thought experiment – a local school (and many others nationally) for under 10 has for the first time put in a defibrillator. At the same time the health service was announcing nationwide a new heart attack “misinformation campaign” and the rapid licensing of a new RNA interference drug to supposedly reduce the risk heart attacks (apparently for no reason at all).
How many layers and people down the varying chains must be involved in these totally not related decisions and how long ago was it ordered? where do the origination of the requirements come from? when was money allocated through procurement for equipment, training etc? The list of questions regarding origination and timing are very long indeed.
It involve at a minimum – media. school management, teachers, local health, local education authority, central govt , medical bodies, regulatory, treasury depts etc.
6
The amazing part of this fantastic story telling is that some intelligent people appear to fall for it, even the redoubtable Greg Cochran at West Hunter with respect to the Russian Army…I suppose we are all potential suckers for the right story, if it tickles some inner fantasy of ours…
3
In the Middle Ages and early modern times, the job of telling the truth to the monarch often fell to the court jester (often known as the Joker or the Fool). He could speak the truth because he was regarded as slightly demented, although they were often very astute. Unfortunately, the managerial elite has no court jester.
8
This is true and important. People in the DR can’t understand what a bubble these people live in. We’re so used to having an alternative viewpoint shoved in our face every day, all day, that we can’t imagine anything else. We constantly have our beliefs challenged.
The never have their worldview challenged by anyone inside their tent. That matters.
8
The managerial elite badly needs a Will Summers, the court jester (or buffoon) in the court of King Henry VIII of England. He was amazingly shewd and Henry often relied on him. Because of his position, he could tell truths to the monarch, which he often did by means of jokes, about, for example, extravagance in the court.
2
A smart ruler wants to have someone challenging his views. We don’t have smart rulers.
The usual suspects have never been good at listening to others.
2
When the inner cities collapse under rampant theft, public disorder, drug use, crime, and tent cites, the rich just leave and rebuild their cherry-on-top bubble world nearby.
Bellevue, WA, a good example. The cloud people decamped from Seattle and set up north of the city.
They also built a mass transit system that links Bellevue to downtown Seattle. It opens in a few months.
They don’t seem to grasp that this train GOES BOTH WAYS. The “people who choose to live outside and do drugs” will go where the money is; downtown Bellevue will be a rotting, decrepit husk in a few years, just like Seattle.
So they’ll decamp again, and the cycle repeats.
But it’s the working poor and the middle class who can’t leave who can’t have things like rule of law or basic public sanitation that suffer.
5
That’s why Georgetown in DC always fought against the Metro getting a extended to it and fought against too many buses going to Georgetown.
1
The Bellevue train sounds like the one-transfer route from Manhattan to small town Dover, NJ.
On the other hand, a jewelry store in midtown Manhattan near an apartment building full of millionaires just got robbed.
Add in the recession lie. Ever since I’ve been paying attention the past 45 odd years, a recession has been defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Q1 and Q2 in 2022 were down 1.6% and .6% respectively – ie recession. Now I keep seeing economists predicting some percentage chance of possible recession in 2023. WTF? They make s*** up about literally everything. You just have to categorically figure anything reported by the government/media complex is an outright lie or seriously slanted at the very least.
13
Z: “It was as if they thought they could will their preferred version of reality into existence if they just pretended it was happening. The script said it would happen, so it was going to happen.”
I’ve been noticing a similar phenomenon on the internet lately; unless I use extremely esoteric keywords, most search engines no longer lead me in the direction of the source which I seek, but instead attempt to divert me to fake websites which are sporting my keywords as though they were real websites.
It’s especially bad when searching for consumer goods, but the very worst is when searching for services.
For instance, about half of the “towing” or “tow truck” websites I get on the internet now are in fact made-in-street-sh!t-istan pajeet fake websites, hoping to intercept my phone call for help [when my car breaks down on me], and thereby get the largest possible cut of the action for having been the first to take my call [and then forwarding my call to an actual local towing service which can help me].
And for well-known name-brand consumer goods on eBay, 50% or more of the top hits will be from “Resellers” who simply drop ship from Amazon or Home Depot.
It’s very strange now, being on the internet, and having to research the hell out of every purchase I make, in order to satisfy myself that I’m sending my money to a Mom-n-Pop Bricks-n-Mortar establishment in a Red State, rather than to some server farm in a slum in Bangalore.
I have a strong sense that absent a particularly serious solar flare, on the order of an 1859 “Carrington Event”, i.e. if the internet continues to function for the next ten or twenty years, the weak-minded will be increasingly lured into fantastical counter-reality lunacy, and even most strong-minded of us will become increasingly infuriated at our inability to peel away all the layers of the onion and get to the heart of the matter [of any particular question du jour].
Russia, Russia, Russia, stay home, wear a mask, take the jab, inflation isn’t an issue, inflation is transitory, Russia, Russia, Russia…
6
“Negative growth”
Mainstream economic Orwellian speak. When an airplane falls out of the sky it must be a “negative climb”.
“This has been the pattern for a long time now. Someone in the managerial class creates a pleasing narrative. It catches on and before long everyone is repeating the pleasing narrative in public. Experts are brought in to explain why this pleasing narrative is realty and then other experts are brought in to present proof.”
Well, this is exactly why they were (and still are) so threatened by Trump. For all his faults, he was like the little boy shouting “The Emperor has no clothes!” Trump was the only one calling them out on their bullshit.
Nobody else had the balls to call “Madam Secretary” Clinton, “smartest woman in the world” “crooked “to her face…
10
If I were running things, the book “The Emperor’s New Clothes” would be required reading in the schools for all students.
4
Reading that wouldn’t provide readers with better eye-sight.
That is inborn.
2
I agree about how relevant “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is to understanding our times. I am amazed at how often it applies.
The one other fable that is confirmed so often is “The Scorpion and the Frog.”
Frog: Why did you sting me to death after I helped you and you said that you wouldn’t sting me?
Scorpion: Because I am a scorpion and that’s what we do.
(Blacks and the chosen)
5
One of the reasons they are so enraged about 2016 is that Hilldawg was supposed to lead us into war over Ukraine and take down Putler so she could show everyone she’s the toughest woman in the world.
3
Ben Carson did a pretty good job on Obama at a prayer breakfast in 2013.
I love Zs sense of humor even while describing the inevitable return of reality. The dummy-come-to-life analogy is fitting; I was just waiting for him to compare Pelosi to Blade from Puppet Master.
You once said,and I paraphrase “there is nothing wrong with Africa. It’s just full of Africans…”
So it goes for America. When the Kraine issue started, the first question I asked was “Why does Russia want the ‘Kraine”? I hopped on the computer to find out. There was at least 20 hours of podcasts, essays and pundits that were objective, dispassionate and honest. They did not even try to sway your opinion, they just threw the facts out and said, “fact check me. Let me know what you think…”. At least 20 hours.
The mass media will give Normie all the info he needs with 35 second sound bytes, and ten minute interviews where homosexuals will interrogate obscure experts. Boom, you’re done! Normie American knows everything there is to know. If anything pops up that compromises the narrative… only bad people notice it. America is full of Americans. So it goes for Canada and Europe too.
Our propaganda machine is global in nature. It is so powerful, Germans will give billions to blooded and tatted full bore “Ukro-nazis”. These guys are covered in swastika tats, death heads and SS lightening bolts. The fuggin JEWS will happily support them too. One wonders what Hitler or Stalin would have accomplished with a propaganda machine like this?
I once saw a YouTube channel where guys destroyed machines in ludicrous ways. In one episode they put a large heavy brick in a drying machine… and it was hilarious as it bucked and swayed as it shook itself apart. I think that is where our media is at today… and that if you’re smart… you won’t stand to close to it.
9
1
“The fuggin JEWS will happily support them too.”
They are not supporting them, but employing them. It may have been that the nazi-tatted fellas were dumb enough to think they had a genuine partnership with (((internationalism))).
However, at the end of this sordid drama, the nazi-tatted fellas are all going to be dead or doing hard labor in Siberia and the (((internationalists))) will be mourning the loss of the profit stream, formerly coming out of the harvested labor of their stupid and compliant white slave monkey’s, from their estates in Israel and America with a glass of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other.
Well, as someone who lives in the DC area, I can tell you that their false reality is, in fact, reality for them. Every day, all day, making up those fantasies and believing in them works on the ground for these people.
They have jobs that pay them a nice salary. They live in nice neighborhoods. Their kids go to good schools and get into “good” colleges. They get promotions. They go on vacations. Etc., etc. Like the king’s court, they do very, very well.
What’s more, it’s also reality that if they go against the false reality – especially publicly – their lives will be destroyed.
Sure, someday, at some point actual reality start to impose itself on their false reality, but until then, their false reality is, in fact, reality to them.
14
Lack of care for reality can go on insofar as dollars can be issued to, and will be taken as if they were valid currency by, the entire world, thus being able to be issued limitlessly.
If that is over, reality will go back to being felt, and looked at as something of interest.
3
Good analysis!
It’s one of those things that – once stated clearly – is obviously correct.
1
I noticed long ago, a man who never cooks for himself loses his mind
8
As with the wish-casting which modern people call socialism/ communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
It always ends in poverty, starvation and piles of skulls.
Incentives matter: if the farmer doesn’t expect to get an adequate return on his labor, then the fields will be fallow.
Reality does not care about legislation demanding that it rain, that the growing season last an extra two months or that the fields increase their yield at 8.046% per annum, using organic free-range electric (or windmill) powered tractors and combines. But it will guarantee these results: fallow fields, poverty, starvation and piles of skulls.
6
The Scandinavian countries did socialism just fine. “Socialism fails everywhere it is tried” is as false as anything that the progressives have ever said.
White and Asian people in homogenous countries can make socialism work well and create more harmonious societies than “every man for himself” capitalism ever will.
Of course incentives matter but they can’t be used to justify policies like mass immigration just because it makes the stakeholders of big business richer, for example.
4
Socialism works if you are small enough and homogeneous enough that it’s like a family…
2
Spot on.
John Derbyshire notes one of the main modes of human thinking is magical. We are now seeing the new and improved mode, memetic magic. Apparently if you retweet a belief enough it becomes reality. We certainly can blame social media for much of this. The failure of all education, public and private, to instill critical thinking bears its share of the blame as well as the atomization of the individual into epistemological closures in the American political sense. The Left have this right although, ironically, it suffers the most from it.
Magical/memetic thinking is relatively harmless until it has the ability to spawn famine and war. This is where we are now. Maybe we should encourage those who wore cloth masks just a few months ago to start clothing themselves in togas or like garments to signal one another and allow us to separate from them as much as humanly possible and to identify them at a later date if the opportunity arises. Thinking it through a bit, though, separation is tough since those I want in togas also have their fingers on the button and the ability to disrupt food and energy supplies.
Our leadership class would have used potions and cast spells in times past, but unfortunately, we do not have the ability to burn them at the stake, at least yet. Maybe in the aftermath of famine and pestilence we can have an auto de fete or tens of thousands?
3
Great comment! The next Savanarola will be a truck driver.
(minor quibble: it’s auto da fe’, btw. Auto de fete is a french masturbation session)
2
Thanks! I would blame auto da correct but can’t.
2
Well, this phenomenon isn’t completely irrational. Large fortunes have been made recently by “bending reality”. Social media and technology are driven by narratives and network effects. Just look at Google and Facebook and Apple etc. – this list goes on and on.
The Political Elite are just copying the technology elite. They want to turn the DR and even normie grillers into Lotus 1-2-3 users – a dead end minority outpaced by “progress”. The standard “software” or “operating system” for any professional now who wants to get ahead is “Prog 2.0”, which runs on all devices and can be downloaded for free.
Of course, the spreadsheet isn’t the company, as many of us have learned the hard way. The real world always wins in the end.
Having been to France quite a bit, and at least as it relates to the construction of Versailles, a notable difference between that world and its times and ours was that the elites there were physically separate from everyone else. The contrast with today is that the people who believe the penis is imaginary live next door to the guy in a MAGA hat.
And our elites today have truly never been so elite that they could live physically detached lives from the common people. The richest guy in New York City or in Malibu has to walk over homeless if he leaves his place. There is no escaping it. I guess a guy like Gates thinks he can go hide away on his ranch, but again, the elites back in the day didn t merely own a ranch of several square miles (640 acres = square mile, for reference) he would own the entire county if not the state. As rich as Gates is, his wealth is a fraction of what it would have been for an upper nobleman such as a count or a Duke.
Very strange times indeed
4
They transit from enclave to enclave in armored limousines, helicopters, airplanes and mega yachts. No care is given to the local inhabitants enroute.
The royalty of olde had to actually see their locals through the carriage, locomotive and ship windows. They couldn’t escape quite as confidently.
Ours live in bubbles. They are insulated and now delusional.
3
The inability to completely separate from the Dirt People in places like St. Tropez and Val d’Isere appears to be one of the main motivators for Gates’/Soros’/the WEFs’ war on mankind and modern civilization.
2
“What is not well known or at least not discussed in the history books, is if the Ancien Régime invested a lot of time in story telling. That is, did they spend their days spinning tales that confirmed their version of reality? Were there people responsible for telling the important people that the peasants were running out of steam and soon they would fall back in line? Did the official information guy at court tell everyone that the unrest in the countryside was transitory?”
No, the Ancien Regime did not do that, and it’s very important to understand why they did not do that. It’s because your entire framing of the situation is incorrect. What you’re doing (which is unconscionable for someone on our side of the “Great Divide,” as you put it) is giving the basic Whig version of history which holds that the Ancien Regime was old and out of touch and that the Revolution, therefore, despite all the bloodshed and excess, was basically justified.
This is totally wrong. The French Revolution was not a peasant revolt, it was intellectual fantasy concocted by educated and courtly men. The peasants in 18th century France were better off than anywhere else in Europe and were generally contented with things. It was educated men like Voltaire and Marat who were the rebels. They were the ones spinning the narratives then, and their ideological descendants are the ones spinning the narratives today.
If you don’t understand this then you have some homework to do. Try reading Spengler of de Maistre or even Hilaire Belloc before making inappropriate analogies to the French Revolution. Whig history is false history and it is inexcusable, at this stage of the game, for anyone on the Right to still be under its spell.
Great read as usual.
One minor point: the ventriloquist’s dummy coming to life story first appeared in the British film Dead of Night (1945) rather than a Hollywood production.
Dead of Night, by the way, is still as creepy af, if anyone is looking for a Halloween movie…
2
Speaking of Hollywood and narrattives, the American expat to Russia Tim Kirby recently made the excellent point on a Duran livestream that, “Hollywood has purchased enormous goodwill for America all over the world, and this is what permits it to get away with so much.”
Unfortunately his points about Russian cinema and confidence were as terrible and conventional, “American guy from Cleveland,” as one could get.
This magical thinking is why dissidents aren’t just a source of exasperation, but lightning rods for outright hatred. When reality depends on people believing in it, the slightest doubt can ruin the spell. It’s like in seance, if one person lets go of his neighbor’s hand – “You spoiled it! It’s YOUR FAULT the spirits couldn’t speak to us!” So now we’re approaching the burning at the stake scenario for those enemies who are thwarting the will of the gods, or of fate, or of History, or whatever magical force is supposed to be in charge.
There was a Monty Python sketch that foretold our present situation: a town with apartment buildings built entirely by hypnosis. El Mystico was able to build entire towers of apartments for just over 5 pounds, as opposed to the usual 1.5 million. And as the town councilman stated, “They are as strong, solid and as safe as any other building method in this country provided of course people believe in them.” The problem being, the moment people begin to doubt, the buildings fall down.
https://montycasinos.com/montypython/scripts/mystico.php.html
There’s a youtube video where actress Erin Gray talks about how one day she was driving home from work and began shaking uncontrollably. A therapist explained to her how the body doesn’t differentiate between what’s real emotion and what’s was merely acting. It’s said you are what you eat and that can be applied to Hollywood and Washington D.C. as well, with everybody following the script being brainwashed into true believers. It’s a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, isn’t it?
2
“Another take on this is where actors in some sort of fantasy performance get sucked into what appears to be a real life version of the fantasy world.”
Two nights ago Fox Business Evening Edit program brought a retired decathlon athlete on as a guest who seems to have no expertise on any topic relative to the interests of viewers. Sadly, he was dressed as a woman, complete with makeup. It must have been fun for him to display his sick proclivities to the viewers, even though no amount of surgery or chemicals will ever change a man into a woman. He is a fiction, protected under the Obama administration interpretation of “sex” in the poorly written Civil Rights Act. Viewing freaks once required a trip to the circus. Now the Biden administration is trying to include queers who will sue when dismissed from school boards that hire teachers that prey on your children. We apparently didn’t learn from the priests and boy scout leaders.
“ But according to Charol Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.””
4
In addition to teachers statistically far more likely to abuse your kids than priests, also never mentioned: other students molesting your kids.
(Impossible to find real data because of shield laws for crimes by minors)
Public schools are sewers.
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Very cool article. It occurred to me mid read that a mix-in of an analogy with Rasputin and the Romanoffs might be appropriate. Rasputin was a psychopathic nutjob. His method of subterfuge was to use the Queen, particularly her dysfunctional maternal instincts against the family and the nation. He also woo’d the women of high society and got them to degrade themselves in orgies and other debauch.
Look at our Burning Man ruling class. Does it not do the same thing? Does it not use the dysfunctional feminine as the tinder to ignite its endless fires? Look at some of the degenerates they are elevating. The Satanist with the gay nightclubs that then provides the morning after STD clinics. The sado-masochist, gay nuclear, “expert.” The Showtune Singing Censor. There is a black female, “computer scientist”, making the rounds mesmerizing white audiences with race and fairness scolding. She has a masters in CS. When she discovered doing her coursework that facial recognition did not work with the color black, she was outraged. Did she advance AI to solve the problem? Did she crack the code? No! She created a career as an evangelist for equity in AI. A team of scolded and cowed Asians and Whites eventually made black facial recognition work better. I can’t come up with a good name for her.
It wouldn’t shock me if Burning Man and its affiliate party scenes and offshoot groups of, “advocates”, is filled with armies of Rasputins that get a lot of these ideas to take off and be reinforced by a bunch of MDMA and psychedelic guzzling managers and credentialites mesmerized in some den of debauch.
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Great commentary as usual, but I ask . . . and then what?
Yes, the problem is systemic and diffuse within the leviathan of DC bureaucracy, and supported by a fawning cohort of acolytes spread throughout the population (Karens and the CNN demographic). OK, you are on a long road trip and your auto breaks down in the middle of nowhere (that is the problem). Do you invest yourself in studying the problem endlessly (open the hood and stare at the smoking engine), or do you use your brain to devise a plan of action that might just result in a solution to the problem? For example, call for a tow, wave down a passing motorist and ask for a ride to the nearest repair shop, start walking toward the nearest town, something other than sit by the side of the road whining and lamenting.
That is where we find ourselves today. Most of us are still sitting on the side of the road whining and lamenting a broken down government and praying that voting harder and muddle-through will save us. What will change this stasis? No one is going to be persuaded to give up the Comfort First Imperative, for that has become too addictive for too long. Only a collapse will bring about the needed change in attitude and motivation.
And that is why the collapse is the cure. For example, the people of western Ukraine (and large parts of northern Europe) are about to find out what a cold winter without sufficient fuel or electricity is all about. This pain must exist before any remedy may emerge. In this new environment, the strong and smart will be best suited to survive. Be strong and smart.