Note: Behind the green door I have a post about our robot overlords and a post explaining how you could have won millions on sports betting over the long holiday weekend, but the was no Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Instead, I was on the Coffee and a Mike podcast and the J. Burden Show.
One of the features of this age is the proliferation of lying to the point where it is reasonable to assume everything is a lie. The West is a liar’s culture now, where only the naivest trust anyone or anything. This liar’s culture is led by the people at the top, who seem to take great pleasure in lying for its own sake. They often lie when the truth would serve them best. As a result of the endless downpour of lies from the top of society, the culture itself is drenched in lying.
At the top, the culture of lying is obvious. We just went through a month where the media and the so-called experts told us that a day-drinking simpleton went from the butt of jokes to heroic strong diverse female character. Of course, the fact that the concept of the strong diverse female character exists is a testament to the promiscuous lying that now defines the entertainment industry. Every ad on television now contains a naked lie, placed there like some sort of cultural totem.
This is filtering down to the rest of the culture. Online, social media is now full of fakers called “influencers” who create an image for themselves that is based on the lie that they are influencing how people view the world. The internet influencer has taken the line from the prior age, “fake it until you make”, and created a lifestyle around it in order to convince the world that they are something they are not. With many of them, it is clear that the lying is the primary appeal.
Of course, deceptive marketing has always been a part of retail economics, but now it is the default assumption. The key to marketing is to create a clever lie that does not necessarily fool people but stands out amongst the other lies. The ability to craft a clever narrative around a product or find a unique way to trick people into thinking they need the thing is a point of pride now. It has reached the point where it is expected, so that an honest appeal feels inauthentic.
You see the normalization of skullduggery in this post about how Facebook pitches itself to advertisers on its platform. The pitchmen laugh and boast about spying on users via the mic on their mobile device to target ads to them. There is no hint of shame at this sort of behavior, as it is both expected and the standard. We now live in a time when not cheating raises suspicions. If Facebook were not spying on its users, violating their privacy, everyone would think it is odd.
The sacralization of lying is not without precedent. The Athenians were famous for their lying and cheating. The Persian king Cyrus the Great famously observed that the Greeks made a habit of cheating one another through deception. Not only were they famous for their lying at the time, but much of what we know about the Greek world comes to us from notorious fabulists. Greek philosophy is the result of this culture that prized lying above all other virtues.
The reason the Greeks were such promiscuous liars is their culture relied upon persuasion to establish hierarchy and public policy. If an Athenian male were particularly clever at winning arguments and persuading the crowd, he would rise in status, which is why young males from prominent families were drilled in rhetoric. In Athens, you could rise to high status simply by being an unusually good liar. The Greek hero Odysseus was a hero because he was a fantastic liar.
This is the fruit of the democratic spirit. In a world where the standard is public opinion, winning public opinion is what matters most. In fact, it must count for more than the truth, as the public often accepts as true things that turn out to be false. If the goal is to win the crowd, then playing to their deeply held misconceptions is just as good, if not better, than disabusing them of those misconceptions. You are more likely to win the crowd through flattery than through confrontation.
This is most obvious in the marketplace. The seller has one goal and that is to get the maximum price for his product. The buyer has one goal and that is to pay the lowest price for the things he needs. Since these are the two things that define the relationship between buyer and seller, both sides have an incentive lie. If the only thing that matters is getting over on the other side, then the truth is not a restraint. As Cyrus noted, it means that Greeks freely lied to their brothers in the agora.
For the dimwitted, democracy in this sense is not the mechanics of casting ballots but the spirit that animates the people. The resulting morality that arises from a culture where persuasion is the standard against which everything is measured is going to be a morality that is intended to persuade the masses. The “good” is not rooted in factual reality, but in the needs of powerful interests whose power relies on winning the mob to their side to the point where it is a habit of mind.
It is how America has become the New Athens. Like the Athenians, we have embraced the democratic spirit to the point where factual reality is just one tool in the toolkit of persuasion that may or may not be used by the successful. The modern sophist is untethered from the truth, both spiritually and emotionally, because the only thing that matters is tricking some portion of the public. The road to riches is to be a clever liar, who even lies about his sincerity.
The lesson of the Greeks, one the framers understood, was that a society stripped free of truth seeking, even when blessed with great philosophers, will eventually persuade itself into a calamity. For the Athenians, it was the Peloponnesian War. For the New Athenians, it will be something similar, but until then sophists will be busy monetizing their predictions, because in the New Athens, the only thing that matters is lying, even if it is lying about the dangers that lie ahead.
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Ironically, the Democrats have installed an incredibly bad liar as their presidential candidate. Kamala has so many tells that people instinctively get uncomfortable just watching her. She dissembles, moves around uncomfortably, talks like a kindergarten teacher, then cackles nervously.
The incompetence of the party is breathtaking. They could have had a smooth liar like Newsome but went with the DEI hire instead.
On behalf of all kindergarten teachers, two of whom taught our kids very well, I protest that comparison! I doubt there’s a single kindergarten teacher as dumb and as bad a liar as Kamala….
I was a k teacher. I kicked all kinds of ass!
Teachers – particularly female teachers – are an incredibly stupid lot. They want the whole world to be ‘fair’ and obey the rules all the time. They are fully on board with the feminization of society, which has crippled it. There’s a reason Laura Ingalls Wilder had to quit teaching when she married. People back then understood and enforced a woman’s proper role and priorities.
Well if its not fair and people don’t obey the rules, how do things usually go for females? Nothing wrong with wanting that, the rules just have to make sense, which they currently do not. Protection amongst the herd. Hard to hate them for it. Kinda like the old fable the scorpion and the frog.
Want to straighten out grade school teachers? Demand that they *major* in the subject(s) they teach when earning their university degree. This is of course, even more important at the high school level. Today, these “surplus” degreed women major in “education” of some sort in the College of Education. Meaning they are simply indoctrinated in Leftist thought and educational theory and leave having little more basic subject knowledge than the students they are in charge of—if that’s even the case. It is *impossible*—for even me—to be certified in this State to teach K-12 without at least a couple of years… Read more »
Ph.D. in quantum electrodynamics from MIT not qualified to teach a 7th-grade science class. Some dingbat with a bachelor’s in education from Morehead State is.
Pretty good indicator of what an idiotic place AINO is.
I took ONE education class in college – on children’s literature – because the old lady who had taught it for decades retired and a well-known children’s author was hired to teach it. Admittedly, she could have been better organized, but she taught about great and classic kids’ books. All the education majors in the class hated it because she didn’t ‘teach’ them how to teach kids to read books.
In defense of the professor, the other teacher candidates you were with, were obviously morons. As I’m sure you know. AND , in defense of teaching children how to read (which– believe it or not is actually based in the science of structured literacy–) it takes more than just one semester to learn that. im actually studying that now: how to teach reading to K-4 students. And I will say, that aside from the namby-pamby, awful children’s “literature” courses, the science of reading is surprisingly cut-and-dry. i wouldn’t still be in the program, if it was namby-pamby methodology. Just my… Read more »
This is exactly correct. I teach secondary ed., and I came about the job in a backwards manner (I majored and MA in my subject – then fell into teaching later). I know my stuff. Most of my coworkers know nothing. I had a coworker last year, in English, working on her dissertation, say that the class was hard because she “doesn’t write well.” I couldn’t help but quip, “Well then, how do you teach writing?” I can assure you, however, that she does know how to put safe space logos on her wall…
“Want to straighten out grade school teachers? Demand that they *major* in the subject(s) they teach when earning their university degree.” No-one wants to. There’s an incestuous relationship between colleges of education, state licensing boards, and teachers’ unions to ensure that stupid people become teachers, not real subject experts. Plus in national politics no-one gives a rat’s ass about public schooling (regardless of the BS rhetoric). Of course the good private schools don’t give a cuss about licensure and just hire competent teachers. Students in colleges of education are typically among the bottom quartile of university students in terms of… Read more »
Agreed. Having said that, the intrinsic merit of students is a far better indicator of likely learning outcomes than the quality of the teacher, her pedagogical approach, and even her knowledge of the subject. In other words, if the kids are stupid criminals in the making, no amount of education of any sort will make a dent in their thick craniums.
“the intrinsic merit of students is a far better indicator of likely learning outcomes than the quality of the teacher, her pedagogical approach, and even her knowledge of the subject.” The ability of the students does matter but that cannot be brought out and nurtured unless there’s a proper curriculum in place and intelligent and knowledgeable teachers. If the bar has been set so low that even the stupid can jump over it, then the smart ones tune out, get bored, become rebellious, and even if they don’t, learn next to nothing because there’s not much in the syllabus. Let’s… Read more »
Arshad Ali: Most private schools now – not just prep schools but Christian schools – brag that they are fully ‘certified’ (by Christian school certification agencies). Which means all their starry-eyed young teachers have . . . education degrees. Both of my sons’ best teachers were older women without such. Pulled the younger one out of his Christian school when his middle-school teachers were new hires, ed majors, all about ‘group work’ and other nonsense.
Okay, I was unaware of this. It used to be that private schools had more latitude in who they hired.
Just an aside—although I’m certain no one here misses the unmentionable aspect of the “why” of group work. I was around before the pernicious concept came about and was applied and afterwards. Make no mistake about it. Group work was designed to enable “group grading”. This enables departments to mix in underperforming students—you know who—and allow them to (pretend to) achieve a passing grade. Collaboration is no doubt an essential part of learning and future job performance, but often allows “free riders”. The competent despises it for that reason. A good, equally yoked team however is an awesome force to… Read more »
“The inevitable outcome is hundreds of millions of ill-schooled Americans.”
Wrong, it is the death of a once great country.
(But you knew this already…)
“Teachers – particularly female teachers – are an incredibly stupid lot.”
Not to mention obscenely overpaid. My neighbor was a 5th grade teacher. Salary? $100k for 10 months. Her husband was a gym teacher. He also made $100k. Retirement at age 55 after 30 years.
Meanwhile, yours truly earned a doctorate and ended up as an adjunct… I was paid $2000 per section to teach prison inmates college credit courses. Half the class were convicted murderers.
That’s alright. Half of your neighbor’s students were future murderers…
The murderers were actually the best students. You have some guy doing 25 to life for killing someone when he’s eighteen, and now he’s 42 and coming up on his first parole hearing. Not only does he want to show the parole board he’s a good boy and they should let him out, he’s an adult now. He’s had to accept that he may never get out. He has to accept and own it. He’s a much better student than an 18-year old kid who goes to community college because he has no idea what else to do.
I believe it.
Apropos of nothing in particular, my father was a secondary school teacher in mathematics. He was hired in 1966 at $6K. He made $20K for the first time in 1982 and was making roughly $55K when he retired in 1997.
Teacher’s salary depends on the state — some states pay well (such as Connecticut) while some pay poorly (states in the Deep South).
True. And I think Californicated pays best of all. Of course, 150K in CA is the equivalent of 60K in Louisiana.
Adjunct status is a horror. Fortunately we did not hire those, but did hire “post-doc’s”, most likely due to Fed money that came along with them. We sometimes granted adjunct status upon request from above, but never saw those folk within the dept. Instead we most often hired full-time instructors on three year contracts. The money was good. In those days, even approaching 6 figures, if you were a long timer, but you worked for it via class teaching. I have never witnessed more abuse than with post-doc’s. Totally sad because we knew that this was a last gasp chance… Read more »
The whole adjunct racket was one of the primary reasons I never pursued a professorship. Didn’t want to schlep around from place to place for perhaps seven years in hopes of snagging the holy grail. And even if you possess that grail, it could be in some dreadful place such as Rutgers-Camden or USC.
“Not to mention obscenely overpaid. My neighbor was a 5th grade teacher. Salary? $100k for 10 months. Her husband was a gym teacher. He also made $100k. Retirement at age 55 after 30 years.”
Teachers’ union plus also a state where teachers’ salaries were higher — say Connecticut, for example.
In some states, some places, there’s a belief that throwing more money at the same education majors will make them better teachers
Yes. But that is because they needed to use the symbolism of Walz/Harris to tell the truth. The mean old White guy screaming at Whites that they are enemy number one while the pogrom dialed up into overdrive became too much even for the sportsball addled consoomers. So, they needed to make the truth more palatable – supposedly. ‘Hey Whitey. We won’t kill you all. See. Here is the place we have reserved for you in Our New Order.’ Of course, that is a lie too. That second place White guy in the future won’t really be white. He’ll fade… Read more »
She’s a “Kameleon”. She will cost us “Kamillions”.
They got high on their own supply.
“The incompetence of the party is breathtaking.” It really is, with biden I always got the impression he’s such a pathological liar that when he lies he isn’t even really conscious of it. Like that famous moment when he was in Michigan talking to blue collar workers where one of them went off script & called him out for wanting to disarm everyone. Biden instantly & seemingly reflexively shouted “BULLSHIT!” at him swearing up & down he would never attempt to take people’s guns. This is a guy who spent his entire political career trying to disarm people & bragged… Read more »
Well put. Is there someone well versed in psychology that could weigh in here? I know very little, but I’ve seen discussion (here, quite possibly) that some of what you describe – e.g. putting into place a clearly inept leader – could be a deliberate demoralization tactic. It should come as no surprise that a President, even a competent one, is never wholly in command. At best he delegates matters to his staff. The present leader is so visibly enfeebled that he probably can’t even take care of his basic daily needs, much less attend to affairs of state. His… Read more »
Ya poor bastard.
Reminds me of the old joke about what they call the MD who graduated at the bottom of their class:
“Doctor”.
Going to be the same with Kamala.
“Madam President”
I think the worst thing about her is the way everything she say is always dripping with condescension. She acts like she thinks she’s the smartest person in every room. This behavior is galling when the person doing it really is very smart. When a simpleton like Kneepads does it, it’s downright infuriating. I literally can’t listen to her talk without feeling rage.
Welcome to the world of Brahmin arrogance.
Yes & they will go further, she will be installed with just enough fraud as the next figurhead. Many will scratch their heads knowing in their gut they have done it again.
Others, “joyous” their side, by any means nessissary “won” Fraud, lies, theft whatever it takes is all good.
I used to hope I’d see torches & pitchforks. I know now all I’ll ever hear is wimpering.
Wall Street is a great example of the New Athens at work. The economic “statistics” that come out daily are a firehose of lies and misdirection. Employment stats, stock and bond prices, the manipulation of precious metals pricing…all buoyed up by the never-ending gusher of money printing. Fiat currency is the biggest lie of all.
It’s literally the same as diluting the amount of gold in ancient coins. People come up with all sorts of justifications for it, but underneath the hood that’s all it is.
“It’s literally the same as diluting the amount of gold in ancient coins.”
Figuratively. 😉
It’s not necessarily Wall Street per se, though they are part of it, but corrupt government agencies who produce lying statistics for political reasons (and other reasons too).
What really amazes me is just how well this works. People believe the propaganda, or at least pretend to believe it publicly.
Deflation is the answer 😉
Everything else is just haggling over who the losses fall on.
Oh, c’mon, dude. So is deflation. The big difference is that in deflation, middlemen can’t skim as much out of each transaction as they can under inflation.
You going to lose asset value no matter what, do you want total chaos (hyperinflation) or a controlled demolition? Take your pick
You do understand that the reaction to deflation is inflation, right? If you have a government with a central bank, it will print as fast as it has to in order to avoid having to pay their debts in deflated currency, right?
Unless you figure out a way to wrest control of the currency, even a moderate deflation will result in the central bank inflating it away.
What makes you think they won’t do whatever it takes to bail out the bankers?
hyperinflation it is then!
Why? Go back to basics. Too much money chasing too few goods. All it takes to avoid inflation is to grow supply faster than you grow money.
I don’t know whether that would be possible under Uniparty spending. Low interest rates are not “stimulus”. Those mean people come up with goofy business plans like putting googly eyes on rocks and selling them on eBay. Higher rates mean you have to convince people to lend you their savings, which are paying interest, and you need to show them they are investing in an even more productive asset.
Which takes us full turn to non-fiat currency, such as gold and silver and Bitcoin. The great unknown, a Fed controlled digital currency in place of fiat.
True enough. I am more pessimistic. The blockchain preserves every transaction, so tracing every satoshi is just a matter of time, or maybe it’s already been done. Would not surprise me if NSA already has a searchable database of most of the blockchain, and is filling in the gaps. Precious metals are better, but suffer the same limitation as people evading the lockdowns — their neighbors ratting them out. Fed-controlled digital currency is worst nightmare. The value in “your” wallet can be limited to whatever they want you to be able to buy, or can be placed on hold indefinitely.… Read more »
There will always be a need for non-tracked real goods and maybe services. Sure, the government may have maximal control via a CBDC. Knowing that one’s wealth could be seized or erased at a whim would only increase the desire of many people to convert those credits into anything of value; notably something resistant to vanishing at some bureacrat’s whim. It might not be precious metals. But any tradable asset is fair game. In modern times it’s been canned food, cigarettes, chocolate, nylon stockings when they were a novelty, etc. Sure, the government could seize goods, but it’s not nearly… Read more »
Agreed, so long as you can avoid having to trade with anyone who would rat you out for an extra ration of beans. Or are Feds themselves, as we’ve seen any number of times since 9/11, including stuff one would not expect, like the Michigan Militia, Malheur, the “kidnapping” of Whitmer, Ray Epps and J6, etc. IIRC, in the takedown of Aryan Brotherhood, all but 2 were released because they were government agents.
I get it, security is on you. I just think slowing that down as much as possible gives us time to come up with less risky alternatives.
Money is ultimately about confidence, whether it’s gold or paper or shotgun shells. It has no intrinsic value, only generally agreed value as a quantification of human work.
Indeed, are you feeling confident?
https://youtu.be/A732Cuuo2tI
Imagine if the Athenians had fiat currency! In Kagan’s (yes I know…) book on the Peloponnesian Wars, he describes Athens’ treasury reserves in great detail at the outset of the War. Trireme crews expected payment in PMs lol. Our Neocons get Ukrainians to die for paper hrvinias. The wars of yore ended when one side ran out of hard currency. Yet another argument for the gold standard….
The the man who became the CEO of Marathon would like to have a word with you: https://youtu.be/SW_G_eJYqrM?feature=shared
Wall Street knows what the real numbers are, and acts accordingly (see Goldman Sachs before the 2008 crash – they were selling those junk CMOs to suckers while betting against them at the same time). Those fake numbers that come out are from the government and for propaganda(“why are you all too stupid to see how great Biden is for the economy?”).
Contemporary America is built on so many lies, one scarcely knows where to begin cataloguing them all. It is a lie that men and women are equal, it is a lie that all races are equal. It is a lie that a woman can be born trapped inside a man’s body. It is a lie that homosexuality is normal, let alone salutary. It is a lie that you have any “constitutional rights” if the government chooses to ignore them. One of the biggest lies of all is that the Jews are innocent and powerless victims instead of the richest and… Read more »
The entire system now is predicated on the lie of equality. Since the basis of society is false, it is natural that even the peripheral aspects are blatant lies. Reality eventually wins out, whether through catastrophe or apathy, and perhaps in our case both.
Yes, the claim of equality in abilities is such a big lie that even the Athenians didn’t believe it….
In the field of lying, the lie of equality might get the top prize. All it takes is simply the ability to observe and draw conclusions to see that equality is impossible. To get people to discard what they see is an amazing accomplishment.
And the lie of equality begets another whopper: diversity is our strength!
The bastard stepchild of equality is “equity”.
What I find most remarkable about this era of never ending lying is how few people don’t or refuse to see it. They just lap up the slop like good little piggies. Modern technology and medicine have simply allowed far too many stupid people to live and continue to spread their DF genes. We’re well past the tipping point.
The pace of events has increased exponentially since 2020. It was hard to keep up from 2016 to 2020, so in some ways i don’t blame them. I think its a self defense mechanism, they believe by giving up on keeping up they’ll save their sanity, not realizing by believing what you’re told instead of thinking, you join the insanity.
Chemtrails filled the skies with poison and we breathed it in, the rains washed the poison into the soils and streams, what plants that grew were poisoned inside, and the animals that ate them were unable to reproduce, and their flesh was poisoned, and the people that ate the animals and plants were poisoned inside, and they flourished not.
So here is what I don’t understand. These pilots just think they are doing something good. In fact it goes to the whole point of the essay: people believe and do things thinking they are good; there is no other way to act or conclude. but if you believe total equality is good, then there is a Nazi around every bush because total equality is fake. So believing error would do it. but I don’t think George Floyd and Ashley Babbitt were actors . There’s a limit to the human capacity to constantly lie.; or remember to lie or keep… Read more »
“What I find most remarkable about this era of never ending lying is how few people don’t or refuse to see it.”
Partly it’s innate stupidity a la “Idiocracy.” But partly it’s poor education, with very few schooled in classical logic and rhetoric.
Another point (not related to people unable to see through the fog of lies) is the poor quality of lies. It’s worthless slop, just bullsh!t of the lowest quality. The people telling them don’t have any brains or education either.
Schools only do so much, i blame the parents not raising their own damn kids. Letting TV and school do it instead.
It’s not school house rock and nice Miss Crump anymore.
But but but muh kids can’t play sports and become a superstar if we homeschool our kids… Number one excuse when I talk to parents about getting their kids out of public schools…
I’ve sat with three very educated guys, all well to the right on the Bell curve from me, who were unable to understand that when the journalists quoted Covid mortality rates in dead “with” corona, rather than “of”, the journalists knew the government were feeding them bullshit numbers, and they willingly played their part in the fearmongering campaign. They understood and acknowledged every step of the argument, but two of them just stonewalled the conclusion and the third saw the abyss I was pointing to, but decided to brush it off as journalists not understanding language.. Ferkrissake, it’s staring you… Read more »
Maybe they are lying about not seeing the lies.
Truth. What’s the point of “seeing” the truth if it gets you unbanked, deplatformed, demonetized, fired, etc.? What has it gained you?
The smart, practical ones will play along until the time comes that one absolutely, positively has to join a side.
“But partly it’s poor education, with very few schooled in classical logic and rhetoric.” Bingo. However, it takes some intellect to do those things above and others not listed. There is a reason why Lynn could find no functioning democracies where the national IQ was in the low 80’s. The USA, and now most other Western societies, is the first to reach “universal” suffrage. Democracy in any other time—and this one too—requires more of the citizen than simply to fog a mirror in order to function properly. We need to redefine democracy to mean something other than universal suffrage. The… Read more »
That’s probably an answer. A better answer would be if we could somehow put some things off-limits for being decided by vote. Like if there were a list of things that were agreed upon could be legitimately decided by “the nation”, another list that could be legitimately decided by “the state”, and at least some that are completely off-limits to anyone else’s say-so.
Then maybe write it down.
And then, anyone violates the terms gets tied by the ankles behind an ox and dragged for however long it takes.
Something I’ve found very odd talking to Zoomers, is they seem wise to the grift/dishonesty/manipulation on social media (more so the tiktoks and snapchats etc that I’ve had almost no exposure to) but they still get swept up in it. For example they understand that someone’s notoriety is for the most part self-sustaining after reaching critical mass without much actual basis in talent or insight, or they understand that people will start beefs and drama simply to create buzz and get a larger exposure, but then the Zoomers would come into work and tell me about the latest stuff as… Read more »
“but they still get swept up in it.”
People still watch studio wrestling don’t they?
Heh, studio wrestling died with the demise of the Memphis territory in the 1990s.
Not so different from older folks who know the politicians are lying but still choose which liars they prefer to the others
Just so, anyone who speaks of the lesser evil. That is how i translate it.
The American populace has always required lies or proper fables. We have reached peak mendacity now and we act shocked and betrayed when we are ruled by the present political class.
Merlin, from my favorite film Excalibur: “When a man lies he murders some part of the world”
In a society where no one is held accountable for military disasters, budgetary malfeasance, global economy-tanking banking fraud, pandemic shenanigans.
Why would anyone tell the truth about anything?
You forgot stolen elections.
I’ve always enjoyed this quote “Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for the trickster and catch him at the first attempt, but beware of an honest man”
Very few honest men these days which is why most are lying to, stealing from, or tricking someone…
I probably shouldn’t be, but I’m still a little nonplussed about these “Republicans Against Trump” ads I see running everywhere. I can understand some former Trump supporters being disappointed in him at this point, but everyone in these commercials says the same thing – “I’m a former Trump voter, but I’m voting against him because [Democrat talking point of the day]”. It is absolutely certain that none of these people has ever even considered voting Republican – must less voted for Trump twice! I’ve been trying to remember if I’ve seen anything like this in a prior campaign – an… Read more »
Among D.C.-aligned Republicans and libertarians (partisan Democrats who think seeming Republican, independent, or other is clever), from Reason to Ace Of Spades, the story since 2015 has been that Trump is a uniquely hated candidate who can never gain votes. By his very nature almost everyone rejects him, and each thing he says or does costs him the _______ vote he may have had if he did nothing, but now he’s lost it. Same story every day*. In real life the number of Trump voters who’ve converted to Democracy—absent debilitating insult to the brain—is exactly zero, so those characters have… Read more »
I don’t think they target you just through your phone’s microphone, but also through your friend’s phone’s microphone. Case in point: I sing in a choir that performs a couple times a year. Once at one of our rehearsals, the director brought a female friend with her who sat in the bass section and sang bass. During a break, I remarked to a friend that I’d never heard a woman sing so low. My phone was in the car. The very next day, in my youtube feed was a video of the world record holder for lowest note sung by… Read more »
Pretty creepy, ain’t it?
It doesn’t bother most which is why they get away with it and for a lot they seem to enjoy it because it’s very convenient for them when they don’t have to search for it…
Heck, I know a few ex-mil, patriot types who are super proud they have every light, clock, and appliance in their house tied into Alexa.
Hell, one of them is even a former operator who still does field service jobs that entail living in the field with the customer for weeks on end.
I just don’t know how to tell them they’re doing it wrong.
Naive and trusting souls. Grillers, I’m guessing.
Google reads your “gmail” as well. It’s in the terms of agreement. Supposedly they scan for keywords to better send you notices of interest. They *of course* do not reveal any of this info to “others” in order to protect your privacy. Of course, others also includes “affiliates”.
We are not a serious *country*. A country protects its citizens—or why have a concept of country at all?
I have a similar experience, where my wife and I noticed the neighbors were removing a stump and we commented that “they were having a tough time removing the stump.” The very next day on youtube a video called “How to Remove a Stump” was featured prominently.
Recently flew to Vancouver.
Looked out the window and saw an airline called “Flair”.
Huh, I commented to my seat mate. Who’s that?
4 hours later “X” promoting stories about “Flair”.
One old fart told me that he would be throwing his watch and his “smart” phone away the day he retired.
I agree.
While the internet is full of lying and fakery, at the same time it’s also also the enemy of regime-controlled TV and print media, because it’s where the truth can reach millions. Discussions and analysis that run counter to what was the accepted narrative, such historical events (especially WWII), race differences, pointing out a small tribe with vast disproportionate power are now ubiquitous because of the internet.
Yes. It is interesting how things have been evolving here now too. They shut down the most followed outlets. However, you can see in the last 24 months how their messages are everywhere. I wonder if the cumulative total of the distributed discussion(s) is greater than the now purged concentrated ones. Moreover, those truths are openly discussed in the mainstream. In addition, they are undergirded and proven by the actions of The Regime. Reality is telling people the truth.
What truths are these that are discussed in the mainstream?
The Internet gives the benefit of possibly finding some signal amongst the endless noise, compared with deliberate suppression of the truth in the official narrative.
The internet is like a free slot machine. You pull the lever and three different stories show up, hitting the jackpot is deciding which one is closet to the truth.
Like gambling, all you can be fairly sure of is the one with all the flashing lights is the one intended to lure in the suckers.
Also like gambling, you can’t beat the house. The best you can do is walk away.
When the casino controls the money supply it’s very hard to walk away and most people won’t unless there is an alternative that is easy to transition too which at this point there is not, which is why I don’t think anyone strays off the casino until their money system collapses…
What passes for “news” is almost always fake and gay at best. One can still arrange his life such that pretty much the only news that matters is stuff from your own community. There’s no point to knowing the daily death count in Gaza, nor how close Russia is to nuking Ukraine.
It’s not like anyone says, “I see here the IDF rescued one of the hostages. That settles it. I’ll have the oven-roast chicken.”
Don’t. I’ve had the oven-roasted chicken and it sucks balls.
Unfortunately, the internet is now loaded with endless lies, even more than IRL, especially in the video format. Though it is certainly possible to lie in writing, it is much easier to lie successfully in video than in writing. It gets a lot of people to the point of saying “I don’t know what to believe,” which is probably good enough for our evil “leaders.”
It is not even so much that we have moved away from truth, but that we are ruled over by people who do not believe in it. They believe, as they made quite explicitly in this “age of disinformation”, that truth is the opinion of the powerful, that they alone are the arbiters of reality and what they say goes. They also believe they can conjure up reality with their magic incantantations. “We will not go back” and “joy” appear to be the new ones, let’s see if they work. I would argue that, as long as these people are… Read more »
. . .and say it’s our fault.
Lies, lies and more lies. Speaking of lies, Lex Friedman, the fake mathematician, who at some point in the not too distant past, just materialized out of the ether and spread everywhere overnight, is getting ready to interview Trump.
Funny isn’t it? Joe Rogan always struck me the same way.
Ehhh…Rogan had a public persona as an actor, comedian, and UFC announcer prior to his podcast.
That said, I can think of three or four other YouTube types with high six/low seven figure subscriber numbers that materialized out of nowhere, like Fraud…I mean Fridman.
Alot of those people got started on Rogan, Jordan Peterson comes to mind.
Rogan was a real guy whose popularity was natural. He “took the ticket” very late, for the Spotify $100m—which they just had lying around, as zero-revenue companies often do.
They showed us who owned him when they had him make an abject public apology for saying he’d heard rumors that some Seattle/Portland-area forest fires were started by antifa-lookin’ guys. (Remember that?) They made him grovel like he’d been caught fingering a baby.
It is jarring to hear Z Man describe the Athenians as promiscuous liars because I was taught that they laid the foundations of the West. That’s okay; I have a deep desire to know the truth and don’t mind reexamining my beliefs.
I ask myself, “Was Aristotle a liar?” I think his observations about human affairs and his taxonomies of the natural world and logic were foundational, even if he got some things wrong.
Then I recall that Z Man suggested Aristotle as “history’s greatest monster.” https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29113
Is everything a lie? Who is an example of a great truth teller, excluding scientists?
The reason Athens had so many great philosophers is they had a great need for truth telling as an antidote to their culture of lying. The Achaemenid Empire did not produce great philosophers, because they treated lying as a capital crime. The philosopher is the reaction to the sophist and the culture that venerates him.
Folks need only read the dialogues of Socrates to illustrate the great insight Z-man shows above. Socrates was convicted and condemned on charges of corrupting the youth and impiety.
As Socrates put it when explaining why he was awaiting trial to his friend, Euthyphro, “They say I am accused of making the stronger argument look weak, and the weaker argument seem strong…”. Using Z-man’s terminology in today’s missive, he (Socrates) called the liars out for their lies, while embarrassing them as well.
Well done Z-man, I might add.
Aristophanes was an Athenian playwright and his comedies are hilarious. For example, in the Assemblywomen, the women take over the government and they decree that attractive men must make love to ugly women.
The Clouds was his take on the sophists. In the play, Socrates was their leader, not their critic, who sits in a basket, gazing at the sky. 
Plato said that Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates contributed to his prosecution. Aristophanes was a popular guy, so maybe he was part of the in crowd that disliked Socrates for being truthful.
I love these kinds of threads. I get exposed to so much I had forgotten or never learned in the first place. Been trying to recall much more of “The Clouds” than “fardles”, but it’s been 40 years. Have to dig it up again.
Thanks, all!
The elites have been lying to their citizens since the beginning of time. The difference then was if things got out of hand and became unbearable, people could go somewhere else and get on with their lives. Not saying it was easy, but it was possible.
Unfortunately in a digital age there’s no way to get away from their lies and go somewhere else. Everything they do affects every aspect of our lives (e.g. banking, travel, property ownership, retirement, etc.) no matter where we go.
When I was still teaching, I used to raise eyebrows when I would calmly state that, whether it be a child or the parent, “I just assume from the beginning that everyone is lying to me.” Kids lie about pretty much everything, not so much to gain advantage, but to protect themselves. Parents lie to gain advantage, sympathy or to avoid accountability. Administrators lie because it’s in their job description. Teachers lie to spare feelings, avoid accountability, or avoid admitting how they’re just glorified babysitters for 80% of students. I moved back into corporate America, and this model has served… Read more »
“Greek philosophy is the result of this culture that prized lying above all other virtues.”
Surely you mean Greek rhetoric? Greek rhetoric and Greek philosophy were at daggers drawn. Rhetoric has continued to be taught in good schools and universities until today, usually as part of the Trivium.
Just recently I encountered the claim that Aristotle was motivated to write Prior Analytics (aka Concerning Syllogisms) to fight the Sophists. The latter were sometimes hired by ambitious citizens who aspired to political careers. See p. 73 of Logic Made Easy by Deborah Bennett, a maths instructor at New Jersey City U at the time of publication (2004). She adds that “Aristotle recognized three figures”. Galen added a fourth more than 300 yrs later.
“… but the next to worst are those who conflate Athens with Greece, while the worst of all are those who know just enough about Greece to lie skillfully to those who know nothing about Greece but believe that they do.”
[attributed to Machon of Corinth]
Sadly, rhetoric has entirely taken over any public discussions about any topic. It is in ALL news reports. It’s in ALL political discussions. It is in pretty much all cultural discussions. In fact, I would say the rhetorical nature of our public discussions is what makes them propaganda. They are ALWAYS trying to convince of you of something rather than to inform you with just the facts. “Our Democracy” works in the exact opposite way one would think it would work. Citizens are not informed of issues and then expected to weigh them and vote intelligently for how to manage… Read more »
“Sadly, rhetoric has entirely taken over any public discussions about any topic.” What’s produced in the US isn’t rhetoric. Rhetoric is a sophisticated thing, with a lot of technical tools. US propaganda and disinformation is a creature of another stripe. It too has technical tools but not the same. One of the many differences is the mode in which each is conveyed — in the first a speaker is addressing either you alone or you as part of a group and is using his voice. In the latter case it’s typically print or televisual in nature. You don’t who’s behind… Read more »
“Greek rhetoric and Greek philosophy were at daggers drawn.”
Correct. In the Apology, Socrates is accused by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon, who represent the orators, the poets, and the politicians.
This is why I no longer care about falsehoods that benefit our side, after all the other side has been clocking up wins with a bucket of lies. I don’t spread them myself, but I also don’t chide anyone who does.
On what basis do you figure that connivance is a healthy strategy? Your enemies have been putting notches in their belts to record victories over people who are habitually self-deceived, habitually hostile to humility (which makes them too confident in their beliefs), habitually eager to repeat their delusions with supreme confidence, and habitually willing to tell lies of their own.
The alternative being…?
If we counter the lies from our side, will they leave us alone?
The shocking thing about this election the entry of RFK. While I disagree with him on many issues, he introduced hard truths on health and our foreign wars. There is an almost shocking feel to see a politician start spouting of truths like that.
Don’t you just love a jew telling you that you shouldn’t vote for a populist because it might upset their world order and that will cause everything to collapse and that would be really really bad…This is Mr. Weinstein… I don’t have a particular dog in this fight. I believe in democracy; I also believe in international agreements. And it is the job of the State Department, the intelligence community, and the defense department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say, “We have a problem. You don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start… Read more »
Trump won’t destroy any so-called “load-bearing walls.” But, boy, oh boy, how I wish he would, and that the whole rotten edifice would cave in on the Weinsteins and the Finkels.
Amen on that Brother but he just might usher in someone who might which is why they put so much effort into stamping him out…
At least the Greeks produced great art.
I wonder if they produced proportionally as much crap as “we” do, but it just didn’t survive to today. It’s a given that hundreds of years from now, artists who are unknown right now will be lauded as the great artists of this era. Thanks to the interwebs, you can easily look up the top 40 songs from any week in the distant past and listen to them. You’ll find that it was full of forgettable schlock, and it’s only the really good songs that survived to become classics that create the impression that music used to be better. Which… Read more »
The absence of rap alone made it much better.
Hah, speak of the devil. Emil Kierkegaard has a posting a day or so ago; https://open.substack.com/pub/kirkegaard/p/is-language-dumbing-down?r=17xj86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email which attempts to measure societal decline in verbal ability, i.e, language. We’ve all discussed general intelligence decline, so why would not verbal ability decline with such as well? One of the articles cited attempted to measure decline through “music compression” over time! Seems music made in the recent era is subject to greater compression that music was a decade or two ago. This is attributed to the lack of complexity in the lyrics of newer music. If you simply repeat the same refrain over… Read more »
I guess in a century we’ll have to settle for sitting around and grunting at each other like Grok and Grog from the classic animated television series “The Gogs.”
Negro music is way ahead of you there pal
The same is true in the music itself. From time to time I’ll encounter a Zoomer who can’t stop talking about some song where things drift from side to side in the speaker/headphones, and after a quick listen, I tell him, “Welcome to the ’70s. Check out Queen or Boomtown Rats or the Stones or Moody Blues or CCR or Zep or Rush or Floyd or even someone as mainstream as Carly Simon.”
Things pretty much got flattened to mono in the ’90s, along with Autotuned, so it is cool to see music getting more complex again.
Don’t know how I forgot this, but in some of the Boston tracks, each tom is panned differently. Some songs it sounds like each guitar string is panned differently, but it’s because they did (at least) 6 takes and blended each take differently across the stereo stage.
It would be great to see what they could do with a modern DAW and recording equipment.
A great example is Amanda. Put headphones on, close your eyes, and you can picture where everyone is on stage. But then the drummer bounces all over the place because of the way his toms are panned. The complexity makes your brain work to process what it’s hearing. That vanished in the ’90s, and it’s now being rediscovered.
They actually painted all that marble with bright colors like a cheap taqueria.
This piece from March in The Atlantic seems relevant: Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death How is a company that sells canned water worth $1.4 billion? When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America—with some notable and appalling exceptions—can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The… Read more »
When i write my history book, the 90’s until the end of the 2020’s will be known as the age of fraud.
It is crazy, all the huge frauds that happened and liars/bad men exposed…
Barings Bank…Enron…OJ…rapey Clinton…rapey Denny Hastert…rapey Subway Jared…rapey Coz…rapey Penn State…ratings agencies…mortgage companies…Arthur Anderson…LIBOR scandal…Silicon Valley Bank…SBF/FTX…Epstein’s island…Anthony Fauci…the list goes on…
The inmates are running the prison.
Jim Gaffigan, before Trump made him lose his mind, had a funny riff on bottled water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECg0vZt-s-E
I always tell people when I see them grabbing a bottle of Evian that you know what that word is spelled backwards… Naive which is what the manufacturer thinks you are when you buy their overpriced water…
You clever rascal. I’d never noticed that.
Not sure of the influence here, but I’m addicted to watching YouTube videos of Europeans, and other nationalities, visiting American and giving their initial impressions of us. Of course, the first is that we are fat! The second is often the portion size in food servings along with huge, refillable, soft drinks. Third quite often seems to be tap water. Not a single European can understand why we would drink such. They, for historical reasons I guess, use tap water only for washing. They buy bottled water for drinking.
Could we be seeing the influence of our new cultural diversity?
Back in grad school I had a Jap roommate one semester. So, we go out to grab a bite for dinner and I order the ribs. He got a salad or some such. They wheel my rack o’ ribs out and I commence to chowing down. I glance up and Toshiki’s eyes are as big around as silver dollars. I ask him what’s the matter. He says in a shaky, awe-struck voice, “Are you really gonna eat all that? If my mom made that, it would be for the whole family!” I’m not a tubber and never have been, but… Read more »
It’s the environment, almost certainly the diet. Full-blooded Japanese, Chinese, Indian, etc. come to America, UK, whatever and those born in the new land, if they adopt the local diet, tend to get the same health problems at the same rates as locals. Usually (but, perhaps not always) their health overall is worse than the kin who stayed in the old country.
Probably true for the Chinese and Japanese, but not the Indians, who come from a country where starches and sweets are the name of the game, and they have the endemic diabetes to prove it.
They probably be appaled to see me drink directly from the garden hose after I mow my lawn.
There’s lying and then there’s this: All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations, and konamei and kinusei and synonymous terms,[5] that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves, •from the previous Day of Atonement until this Day of Atonement and …• ♦from this Day of Atonement until the [next] Day of Atonement that will come for our benefit.♦ Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no… Read more »
Will New Athens’s Syracuse expedition be in Ukraine, Iran or China? Or will reality come crashing in in the form of a financial collapse?
For just $9.99 a month you can get my newsletter, “The Coming Calamity” where I explain all the ways this can unfold!
lol
Martin Armstrong has already got that market niche, at a slightly higher price…His AI is predicting that there will be no elections in 2028, and the country will likely break up…
Vox Day for decades has predicted the Break Up of the USA in the early 2030s.
Dan Kurt
Where do I sign up? 🙂 🙂
Yes and yes.
This empire built on lies cannot stand for very much longer. Many (a majority?) Americans and Europeans I believe are beginning to adopt the attitude of Soviet citizens back in the day concerning the lies coming from the “leaders”:
они делают вид, что говорят нам правду, а мы делаем вид, что им верим
Translated: They pretend to tell us the truth and we pretend to believe them.
My favorite was the play on words,
“There is no truth in Pravda, and there is no news in Izvestia.”
In Russian, Pravda means “Truth,” and Izvestia means “News.”
The motto should be “faking it IS making it!”
The quote “If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made” is often attributed to American comedian George Burns. 😉
In a hyper-financialized economy, where everyone is almost required to spend their money or “invest” it as fast as possible, the lies and deception are accelerated by an order of magnitude. When every moment you keep your money becomes a loss due to inflation, you’re frantically looking for the “least crooked” vendor.
Add this is our election process, where every four years is the possibility for society to be upended, and you’re going to get hucksters, as there’s no way to vet all the new people entering the political field.
Deflation fixes all the problems and you don’t even have to lift a finger! I’d buy that for a dollar 😉
https://youtu.be/_dGh7p1tZmk
Is society actually upended every four years, though? Or is that just the frantic feeling one gets from the political circus?
2020 was certainly not run of the mill.
Are you referring to the virus shenanigans? I don’t think that was a consequence of the elections.
You’ve got it backwards, i think it was because of the elections, and also the need to print a shit ton of money with some pretext.
Maybe, but there was no *need* to print money. It’s not like Trump backed off on the money printing. And chowderheads of all stripes were cheering low interest rates as if capital destruction and wiping out savings were a good thing for society.
The Treasury already had phenomenally good terms on their bonds, being able to sell them at or even above face value. Why upset the apple cart?
Because the economy began to blow up again late 2018, continued thru 2019 and went into crisis mode beginning of 2020. They were already QEing in 2019, you just didn’t know it. It couldn’t handle rates of 2.5 without printing. Only reason we’re at 5.25 now is because of all the printing in 2020 plus they’re still running a deficit of over a trillion dollars a year. Those were considered catastrophic in 2008.
Define “blow up”.
Despite all the “money printer go brrr” going on, the Fed couldn’t cause inflation. There was too much growth, too little unemployment, even if a good share of growth was unhealthy and unsustainable. The lower cost of energy in particular was a “problem” to the central bank and the government, who saw they were going to have to pay debts with deflated money.
Very cunning people sold that as “blowing up”, and most people bought it. It was lies all the way down.
In stopped clock fashion, the Dems had the right answer to that, if for the wrong reason. The Donald wanted even lower interest rates, like Obama had, because the higher rates made him look bad to people with a feeble grasp of how the economy works. The Dems opposed it not on any principle other than opposition to whatever The Donald wanted.
Italy didn’t start lockdowns months ahead of the curve because of, or as a consequence of the outcome of American elections.
Loads of countries didn’t continue with those policies for years afterwards because of the American elections. China certainly didn’t.
You can say the American election rules (like mail-in) were fudged as a consequence of the virus business, but I wouldn’t really call that upending society, not to mention the virus was just a convenient excuse.
And they hardly need an excuse to print more money, just like raising the debt ceiling etc. any excuse will do, if that.
if you say so, not sure what italy has to do with anything. You can believe whatever you want, for now 😉
As Z touches upon, the Mendacity Motive applies to capitalism, too. Telling the truth about one’s good or service is very far down the list of priorities. The only true objective is to sell that good or service for the highest price possible. And lying may achieve that objective more surely than honesty. And this is why living in a capitalist economy is so tiresome. In anything of significant value you purchase, you have to be on the lookout for for fraud. Not only can we not trust politicians, “journalists,” and professors, we can’t trust the guy who’s fixing our… Read more »
That is certainly true of a one-shot, just as it is in Prisoner’s Dilemma. The key is in engineering it into being an iterated interaction.
EBay and Amazon and Temu and so on don’t have the return and refund policies they have because it’s good for a one-shot, but because it’s the best answer to repeat business.
Unfortunately, when we get old, we get “stupid”. Cognitive facilities decline and we become too trustful in old age. I get most of my phone calls these days promoting scams designed for “old” people. Wife yells at me for playing along, but hell I’m bored so I play along until I get the gist of the scam. I’ve even known folk who’ve been taken in by the proverbial “Nigerian Prince” fraud who seemed absolutely competent in every other aspect of life. Interestingly, in this case, the failure to be suspicious preceded the onset of Alzheimer’s diagnosis by about 6 years.… Read more »
Good to know Alzheimer’s won’t soon be on my bill o’ fare, because I’m one suspicious sumbitch. And the wifey may be even more suspicious than me. We don’t even bother answering the door if we don’t recognize the face.
In the present “great society” we’ve made for ourselves, cancer is not the big killer—it’s age and loneliness! Such has not arrived yet for us lucky few.
“…When Croesus asked Solon who the happiest person was, expecting Solon to name him due to his immense wealth and power, Solon instead explained that true happiness can only be judged after a person’s life is complete, and all its trials and tribulations have been experienced…”
Really, the older I get the more I realize there is nothing new under the sun—that especially applies to wisdom.
“until then sophists will be busy monetizing their predictions, because in the New Athens, the only thing that matters is lying, even if it is lying about the dangers that lie ahead.” Correction: “until then sophists will be busy monetizing their predictions, because in the New Athens, the only thing that matters is monetizing, even if it means lying about the dangers that lie ahead.” Remember when Perception Managment replaced lying? Remember when, “nudging”, replaced psychological manipulation and lying? As for that “news” story, remember what the names of people on, “news” stories used to look and sound like? The… Read more »
I do take exception to your crack about Kamala’s “day-drinking.” If someone can efficiently wrap things up and quickly get to the real work of the day — namely, drinking — then more power to them. I do not advocate morning drinking but everyone knows afternoons are useless, anything not happening by lunchtime is simply not going to happen, any momentum totally lost as Debbie from Accounting takes everyone’s orders for Chinese or Panera. May as well just knock off, relax and smell the Four Roses, or Genny Creams as the case may be Plus you get into a lot… Read more »
I don’t think lies in and of themselves are all that effective. Twain wrote on Huckleberry Finn that the Royal Nonesuch got the King and Duke tarred and feathered. Rather, it is lies plus patronage that tends to keep those in power, in power. When the Berlin Wall fell, it fell in large part because the border guards had not been paid in three years (1986 being their last payday). When the Soviet Union fell, the military had similarly not been paid for three years and the security services had not been paid in two years. The Athenians had lots… Read more »
I recall that it was one year the Soviet military didn’t get paid before it fell apart. Not to quibble, that’s not what I’m getting at, because either way, the point is the regime can survive an economic collapse, for a while. But not forever. Of course in AINO, where money is valued above all, it might take less time.
I don’t think it’s possible to compare economic collapse between the USSR and potentially, the USA. The economy of Russia was run completely and totally from the central government. Collapse may happen, but it will take a different form to be certain.
Agree. I like to pretend I’m more or less ready for a rapid collapse that sends the ferals out ravaging the countryside, but I think a much more gradual “end” is in the offing. Not because our betters care about us, but rather, worst case, as I run the numbers, the fuel runs out before the food. Out of fuel vehicles clogging the roads, ferals not able to figure out how to get fuel out of the few underground tanks that still have any, etc. Not to mention that ferals are similar stock as Haitians, so long pork is an… Read more »
I’d not heard the Soviet lack of payment. It really doesn’t speak well of a government when it can’t even print up fiat money to pay its own employees. Shortages of ink? Paper? Lack of record keeping or banking systems? Curious to find out.
It’s been a long time since I read Huckleberry Finn, but my recollection is that the King and the Duke didn’t get tarred and feathered. They left town before the last show, knowing that the townsfolk were preparing to tar and feather them.
Natural Flavors
Music suggestion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTdScE3Rqh8
Well I didn’t think I was gonna listen to the whole thing, but I did.
Sounds like the pianos been drinking!
And now my friends I link this to are going to ask be about your rhetoric and sophistry! 🙂
A wise man (or his ass) once observed “Sophisticated is how you feel when you are drunk but can’t pronounce it.”
[…] ZMan pulls the curtain back. […]
“It has reached the point where it is expected, so that an honest appeal feels inauthentic.” Disagree. In a society where everybody lies, Trump stands out because of his authentic moments, moments where he is telling the truth. Trump also lies or conveniently glosses over inconvenient details, but he’s also quite frequently honest. It makes an impression. “It is how America has become the New Athens.” Don’t forget about homosexuality being such a fad in elite circles. That said, Athens was a fairly minor city as of the mid 1800s. It was said to have a majority Albanian population at… Read more »
The Greeks of the ancient age (siege of Troy), the classical age (Plato, Socrates, Diogenes, etc) and modern age are not the same people, some interesting discoveries from DNA analysis seems to indicate.
The West is a lair’s culture now, where only the naivest trust anyone or anything. Yes, now, but when has it been otherwise? Parents have been telling their children variants of the Santa Claus myth for centuries. Because it’s so much fun to deceive children, and the kids love it! The USA’s Constitution begins with a whopper. Article VII pretends to tell you the law of “Ratification” and “Establishment” before both of these. To protect this abomination the USA has built one of the most aggressive militaries in human history, and she menaces billions with nuclear annihilation should they dare… Read more »
Probably stupid to feed the trolls, but since I’d rather you repent than die in sin, “sabachthani” almost certainly means “left” or “withdrawn”, not “abandoned”. As God, He could not die. Not much of a sacrifice if His divine nature couldn’t die, and could suspend the suffering at any point He’d had enough. The only way He could be “fully man”, and thus the ultimate sacrifice, is to withdraw His divine aspect and be said to have “descended into the dead”.
I have some quibbles, but you could at least pretend to have read the theology.
Incidentally, He says a bit earlier that He could call upon His Father and He would have a legion of angels. If that’s the case, wouldn’t willingly giving up that option and becoming obedient unto death feel something like that power had left Him?