Two of the Most Disturbing Things I’ve Seen So Far…

by

…in a month with many disturbing things, are these:

—a collection of articles…from ‘respectable’ media…which are basically demanding that individuals stop trying to do critical thinking.   Does this represent the start of an extensive media campaign in that direction?

—nihilistic and anti-human tendencies on the part of the new head of a major Federal agency…at least, that’s certainly how I would interpret her statements.   And plenty of media people are cited with viewpoints which are basically similar or more extreme.

27 thoughts on “Two of the Most Disturbing Things I’ve Seen So Far…”

  1. We are heading for a rough patch in political life the next month or two. I made reservations on Southwest Airline to attend a wedding in November. I don’t know if they will be flying then. They have cancelled a thousand flights this past week because pilots and other employees are refusing vaccination. The airline blames “weather” but it is becoming well known that resistance is the reason. The LA County Sheriff has announced there will be no vaccine “mandate” for his deputies. My son, who is a CalFire fireman, says that none of those state employees has been required to accept the vaccine. Several hundred Congressional employees have been treated for Covid with Ivermectin while state medical boards threaten the licenses of doctors who have prescribed it for patients.

    This seems to be coming to a head soon.

  2. – It was clear from the day after the 2016 election that They were never going to let anything like that happen again. Facebook was the most publicly circumspect because their userbase is actually fairly old and the Trump campaign was incredibly effective there. But the Dems spent several years pushing for overt censorship and they’ve been quite effective in getting their way. The GOPe just whines and moans, the Dems go for the jugular. I want candidates who will threaten Silicon Valley with destruction, or else don’t even bother to run. It will be interesting to see how social media companies react when Trump runs again–do they realize or care how it will look when a candidate for president runs while he is banned from all of their platforms?

    – John Holdren was an anti-human lunatic and no one batted an eye. It’s time for a GOP that acts as viciously as the Dems do in these cases–they push their most insane people forward as much as possible, and never ever apologize for it. Meanwhile Trump fired Flynn in an instant based on lies from those who hated him and wanted him destroyed. That sort of weakness has to end.

  3. Brian…”I want candidates who will threaten Silicon Valley with destruction”

    Careful, though…it is easy to envisage a regulatory regime which would basically shut down everything that is not controlled by traditional major-media gatekeepers…including blogs including this one, Instapundit, and just about all others.

    Too many people believe that ‘freedom of the press’ means special privilege for the class of Journalists, rather than something that applies to ALL Americans.

  4. “Careful, though”¦it is easy to envisage a regulatory regime which would basically shut down everything that is not controlled by traditional major-media gatekeepers”
    That’s what we’re moving towards at full speed right now. Standing down isn’t what’s called for, making Them feel equally threatened by us as they are by the Dems (who they support anyway) is what is needed.

  5. From one of the articles: “The reason is simple: most of us, even those of us who are scientists ourselves, lack the relevant scientific expertise needed to adequately evaluate that research on our own. ”

    This statement appears to be true for many mainstream journalists, who obviously lack even elementary understanding of statistical analysis such as they might have learned in an undergrad course for non-specialists, or even basic numeracy. However, for the intelligent layman it is nonsense. It takes no specialized skill to look at a research study, even the abstract, and note the size of the test and control groups, whether the study is a retrospective study, whether the data come from self-reporting, whether variables look like proxies, whether the reported effect is of marginal or obviously significant magnitude, whether the study results corroborate other studies, etc.

    Competent journalists might understand these issues and attempt to clarify them for intelligent laymen. Of course, many journalists are either incompetent or corrupt, and many laymen are themselves poorly educated.

  6. “which are basically demanding that individuals stop trying to do critical thinking.”

    Not surprising really. You are down from a steady 2000 dead a day, a bit. I suspect bad numbers, as they are almost normal now. Your vaccination rates are of course to blame for this. Not even 60% fully vaccinated. This means your unvaccinated will die at a fairly steady rate, while your vaccinated will not. As well your large unvaccinated population is a breeding ground for new mutations. Its quite possible something much nastier will develop from this viral churn.

    Individuals in America are apparently incapable of critical thinking, so your government would like them to stop trying. ;)

  7. Trust the experts? See Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist” for starters. Then consider the fact that for more than half a century virtually every expert in the behavioral sciences in this country assured us that there’s no such thing as human nature – the so-called Blank Slate orthodoxy. I suggest that anyone doubting that this actually happened read “In Search of Human Nature,” by Carl Degler, or, better yet, “Man and Aggression,” edited by Ashley Montagu. The latter contains such gems as, “man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings,” and “The fact is, that with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless.”

    Montagu was the self-appointed “voice of science” back in the 70’s and 80’s, and appeared tarted up as such, for example, on the Johnny Carson show:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQpUvInXNF0&t=42s

    It didn’t take a highly educated layman to expose this charade. Any reasonably intelligent ten year old knows there’s such a thing as human nature, and yet “science said” there was no such thing for many years by virtue of shouting down, denying access to journals, and threatening the careers of anyone who dared to object. The idea that no such ideologically motivated pressure to conform to a preferred narrative exists in other sciences, including the “hard sciences” today is the purest fantasy.

    OTH, what’s not to like about the anti-natalists? We should encourage such biological dead ends, as their subtraction from the gene pool will leave our own children with more elbow room and a cleaner environment. It’s amusing, isn’t it, that, at the very same time that they vilify people with children for destroying the environment, they shout loud hosannas when they see the borders thrown open to hordes of illegal aliens whose impact on the environment here will be far worse than if they had stayed in their own countries.

  8. MSDNC Media: Kids, don’t try this at home!

    Feynman (from memory): Science is the organized distrust of experts.

  9. remember that old bradbury tale, the sound of thunder, a butterfly effect brings about a regime of unthink, that’s where we are but shambling man, is atop it

  11. Critical thinking (not crt) is part of what those that believed in a free press, religion, markets always valued – indeed none of these work all that well if we aren’t analytic, because some ideas and products are always going to be shoddy, it is not the open market but the thoughtful application of reason in the choices made within that market that makes them work.

    The last eight months have been increasingly depressing – as our representatives seem to have stopped seeing themselves as our representatives but more as, well they might see themselves as Internationale citizens (or, at least for some) as grifters who owe their allegiance to foreign (esp Chinese) bribery or foreign extortion. They certainly lost the basic American belief in subsidiarity and are trying to nationalize everything – the police, the schools, welfare – and are ending up forcing the states to do (which they really can’t) the federal job of protecting our borders and controlling immigration.
    Thanks for putting these up David, but they aren’t exactly heartening. 20 years ago a common remark in these parts was that there was a problem if a country/nation/culture was unwilling to defend itself in a fight to the death and unwilling to reproduce itself.

  14. It’s hard to see most of this as anything but nostalgia for the good old days when there was no alternative to the MSM and when the nightly news was mostly a paraphrase of the front page of the NYT. It isn’t that way anymore.

    At the same time, look at Drudge. It didn’t take long for people like me that had been following him for 20+ years to realize that he was no longer worth looking at and his audience disappeared. The same has happened to cable news and the networks. I expect the same to happen to Facebook and Twitter eventually although the momentum will probably carry them long enough to surprise me.

    I just skimmed the articles, but I didn’t notice any mention that the “authorities” needed to earn our trust by, for instance, being right or truthful. Considering the sources, you wouldn’t expect the fact that the authorities had been neither to get in the way of asserting just that.

  15. I’m old enough to remember when critical thinking was required in order to get through college–even mediocre college, and even though the phrase was never foregrounded.

    The more Ed-schools yammer about critical thinking, the less of it they practice, and we end up with trickle-down CRT.

  16. stone manning seems like one of the ‘fire men’ from fahrenheit, frankly all of these officials are mayorkas, austin garland et al, they just abet our enemies and chaos, they serve moloch (becerras) and other elder gods,

    yes constructivist learning techniques were born in the soviet union, that is what we have been labouring under for at least 30 or 40 years, they are mind arson, designed to ‘dissolve the citizenry and elect another’ in brechts phrase,

  18. Maybe slightly tangential to the topic. While much modern writing is disturbing, writing from an earlier age can be thought-provoking. Especially when we consider that we live in an age of specialization and technology — we are all so dependent on people we don’t know doing things we don’t understand.

    Harold Lamb wrote “Ghengis Khan: the Emperor of All Men” in 1928, based on a wealth of ancient manuscripts. Since the Mongols were functionally illiterate, the records were written by other cultures, many times smarting from defeat and/or years later. So who knows if Ghengis really said the following while pondering the high costs of his military conquests and the wealth their success was bringing to the Mongol people (p. 198):

    “My descendants,” Ghengis Khan had said, “will clothe themselves in embroidered gold stuffs; they will nourish themselves with meats, and will mount splendid horses. They will press in their arms young and fair women, and they will not think of that to which they owe all these desirable things.”

    Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

  19. Individuals in America are apparently incapable of critical thinking, so your government would like them to stop trying.

    Yeah. Decades of socialist education and now a socialist regime.

  21. Two points… One, it ain’t brainwashing that’s going on; it’s “domestication”. Y’all are being broken to the yoke, and the ones making you pass under it are the “woke” and their masters, who really aren’t of “the Left” any more than their co-conspirators are of “the Right”: They’re two halves of the same oligarchic wannabe aristo coin.

    They keep doing all this crap “for our own good”, like mandating and then taking over education. You might want to examine that proposition, and question just how much “good” they’ve done for the rest of us who’re outside the winner’s circle in their minds.

    The other thing is, our “media” have never been trustworthy; they’ve always been corrupt, tools of the oligarchy. Remember Duranty? Any of the other “great journalists”, who all turned out to be lying liars who lied? Or, just as bad, feckless credulous morons who never paused to wonder why they were the ones that were being fed all the leading information from within the government? Or, what the motivations of their informants might be?

    All the while, having ignored the same damn thing done by earlier Democrat administrations? I mean, I can say one thing for Nixon–He didn’t utilize the FBI to spy on his political opponents, probably because he was smart enough to know that they were on the other side of it all. Meanwhile, Johnson had the FBI put informants directly into the Goldwater campaign, and knew everything they were doing before they did it.

    Although, I’d probably be able to find data showing that Goldwater himself was something of a put-up job, meant to lose, and knowing it. Apparently, per one source I read years ago, they knew they had FBI informants in the campaign headquarters, and were strangely calm about it…

    So, yeah–I’m of the opinion that the whole thing is a Kabuki show, meant to distract us with legerdemain, while they pick our pockets with the hand we’re not watching. The whole thing is going to end in tears, when they push the wrong people too hard in the direction they don’t want. The current “Irish Democracy” you’re seeing here with Southwest Airlines and other such events? That’s the canary in the coal mine, and unless they listen carefully and amp their shit down, this is going to end with a lot of the assclowns in DC dangling from trees and lamp posts. They’re getting their warnings with the whole “Let’s go, Brandon” thing, but I don’t see them demonstrating any grasp at all what that means, nor are they taking any actions to back off on doubling down with the stupid.

    I gotta feeling this is going to end in a paroxysm of violence that is going to be breathtaking in its breadth and depth. The “activists” ain’t who you need to be watching; it’s all the “silent majority” types who’re getting real tired of the BS, and who’re quietly sharpening the knives and tying the knots. You don’t need to worry about the people who showed up for the theater and cosplay in DC on the sixth; the ones you need to worry about are the type who would never, in a million years, raise their heads like that. It’s not the protestors you should be concerned with; it’s the ones who’re out across the countryside and who have been taking careful notes about where certain people live, and what their daily habits are. Push those types far enough, and you’d better plan on living in an armed enclave somewhere, if you’re part and parcel of the “other side”, because you aren’t going to be safe. Anywhere.

  22. “Push those types far enough, and you’d better plan on living in an armed enclave somewhere, if you’re part and parcel of the “other side”, because you aren’t going to be safe. Anywhere.”

    Come play Fallout 76, its everything you need to practise up for the apocalypse. ;)

  23. I think the media has jumped the shark recently, going from ignoring stories they don’t want to cover to just brazenly lying about them, with this Southwest Airlines thing being the most conspicuous example. Everyone knows what’s going on, and that the media and government and everyone else in authority is lying, it really is taking their dishonesty to a new level.

  24. Kirk: “… unless they listen carefully and amp their shit down, this is going to end with a lot of the assclowns in DC dangling from trees and lamp posts.”

    It is always useful to look at history — the great principle of Uniformitarianism: Anything that has happened before can happen again.

    It is worth investigating modern examples of governmental collapse. The Romanian example of what happens when an incompetent Political Class pushes things too far did indeed end with ropes & lamp posts. On the other hand, the USSR example of financial mismanagement, corruption, & incompetence — which may be more relevant to the US situation — did not.

    There are noticeable parallels between the current US and late-life USSR — large numbers of citizens losing respect for the rulers; a one-party state; huge obstructive bureaucracy; senile leaders; trade deficit; unsupportable debt. One would guess there would be a lot of interest in exploring the lessons from the collapse of the USSR — but that seems to be a bad guess; there is not much accessible research & analysis. Presumably, academics (the most biddable of the Useful Idiots) know to avoid the topic if they want to keep getting invitations to the cheese & wine parties, and think tanks find it benefits their funding to avoid researching it.

    Strange! Simple interest in self-preservation would make a smart Political Class wonder how the US can end up collapsing like the USSR instead of collapsing like Romania. But if we had a smart Political Class, we would not be staring down the muzzle of collapse.

  25. I’d like to add a disturbing thing–the sudden ubiquitous use of “pregnant people”. Complete obliteration of reality, womanhood, motherhood, etc.

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