In a society of “believers” & “deniers” we all become Inquisitors
Catte Black
Light often arises from a collision of opinions, as fire from flint & steel”Benjamin Franklin, 1760
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” John Stuart Mill
The “collision of opinion” so endorsed by enlightenment thinkers, is not currently encouraged. If someone says something stupid or blatantly false our first response is no longer to try to prove them wrong – it’s to silence them.
To quote Jonathan Pie we focus on “stopping debates instead of winning them.” A good recent example of that is the bizarre trial-by-media of Polish right-wing MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke.
Let’s be clear. JKM seems to hold a pretty reactionary and unpleasant set of views, about women and much else. Speaking as a woman, I’m not a fan of that. Here is the gentleman, talking about the gender pay gap, in the discourse that ignited the current eruption of outrage:
His English is broken, his reasoning shaky and his conclusions pretty flawed. He’s a self-created straw man, waiting to be knocked over by any reasonably intelligent or astute opponent. But what has the response in the media been?
Yes, that’s right, not a series of rational refutations, but a chorus of offended people hurling abuse and demanding the clown be censored.
Piers Morgan, who invited Korwin-Mikke on to Good Morning Britain did little more than exchange playground insults with the man. Korwin-Mikke says his opinions are based on “scientific studies”. Did Morgan bother to ask what these “studies” might be? Did he offer counter-evidence that proves the nonsense Korwin-Mikke is talking?
No. He just called him “stupid” and a “sexist pig”.
Ok, maybe JKM is both those things, but that’s not the point. If he’s wrong he should be shown to be wrong, with rebuttal, not ad hominem. What Morgan did, and was lauded for, isn’t debate, it’s an ignorant brawl, or the two-minutes hate. The fact the hate-figure on this occasion is some man with unpleasant ideologies and dodgy data does not make it a great day for democracy.
The call is mounting for Korwin-Mikke to be “kicked out” of the European parliament. The Soros-funded fake grassroots group Avaaz is leading this campaign, and lying about him into the bargain, publishing photos of him doing a Nazi salute, without bothering to tell anyone he was, as the Independent grudgingly confirms in its text, doing this as a derogatory commentary on current German policies, and not as a tribute to Hitler (yes, it was still inappropriate, but that doesn’t justify a blatant falsehood being propagated in pursuance of a witch hunt).
Avaaz’s campaign already has over 700,000 signatories. And indeed Korwin-Mikke is going to be dealt with by the EP itself, who have promised:
…a penalty commensurate with the gravity of the offence”
Offence?
Is it actually illegal now to say untrue things about women? We’re going to punish this guy, not prove him wrong?
So, who cares, right? So, one misogynistic fool gets falsely maligned and hounded in the tabloids and maybe even “kicked out” of parliament, who is any the worse for it?
To which the obvious reply is – do you really think it will end there? Do you think the neoliberal press and toxic propagandists such as Avaaz are busy fostering this atmosphere of anti-intellectual intolerance just so they can deal with a handful of women-haters or other nasties?
The point is, once you have installed the culture of suppression, you can use it in any way you like.
The insidious new meme being developed in “progressive” places like the Guardian, and other neoliberal strongholds is that free speech is all very well, but has its limits. Not, you understand, the already established limits defined by law which make it clear free speech does not include the right to threaten, defame or incite violence. No, these are new and woolly limits that involve misty concepts like “hate” (not hate-speech, which is also defined by certain laws, but “hate”, which isn’t), and “consensus facts.”
We are told that people who transgress these vague new limits need to be stopped – for the good of society. We are told we are living in a time of unprecedented “hate”, even though prosecutions for hate-crime are dropping. We are told we need to take a stand, “stamp out” this “hate” and make a statement of zero tolerance.
On the surface that’s a reasonable thing. No one sane wants to encourage hate or to be a “hater”. But what we may not notice is that the “progressives” advocating this approach never say exactly what they mean by “hater”.
“Hater” of what exactly? Ethnic minorities? Women? Trans people? White men? Oligarchs? Israel? Corrupt politicians? The NSA?
What if the corrupt politician is a woman?
What if the NSA spokesman is black?
And exactly how far can we go to stamp out “hate”? Is it acceptable – for example – to rescind an elected representative’s right to sit in the European Parliament if he’s branded a “hater”? Who would be empowered to make this decision? The parliament itself? Oligarch-funded pressure groups with hordes of unverified signatories? What are the exact definitions? Where is the line drawn? We aren’t told, and that’s probably not an oversight.
“Denier” is another word like “hater.” “Deniers” are the boogeymen to sell us the idea that free speech is dangerous, not just for minorities, but also for the preservation of truth. The same people who talk about “haters” frequently ask how we can allow “deniers” to keep muddying the argument about [insert contentious issue here], when the world/human health/the future of the universe is at stake.
The starting point is always the fallacy that we can establish truth to a degree that makes further discussion of evidence unnecessary and doubt a sort of crime. Once we know the Truth, the argument goes, we don’t really need free speech any more. In fact free speech in a time of established Truth becomes a regressive force, since it will enable those who don’t believe the Truth, or who are paid to besmirch it, to lead the unwary from the path of certainty into darkness and doubt.
If that sounds like religious fundamentalism it’s because essentially that’s what it is. It’s the fundamentalism of a post-deist world. Just as anti-rational, just as anti-factual, just as atavistic as any other expression of certitude that requires unqualified acceptance as the first article of faith.
But this particular “fundamentalism” is being used cynically as another way of levering public opinion away from real free speech and toward “modified” free speech, where the right to air your opinion is conditional upon a lot of poorly defined, and often faith-based ideas about public health and social responsibility.
Let’s pause for a moment and evaluate.
Why do so many of the same neoliberals who support environmental disasters such as global wars and nuclear energy, also swarm the issue of climate change, and so vocally agitate for the silencing or denigration of “deniers”?
Why when the absolutely not “denialist” IPCC is openly admitting there can at present be no certainty about the extent or direction of longterm global temperatures, is any kind of demurring from the belief that manmade climate change is not only real but deadly, presented to us in the liberal media as something malign or insane that should not be given airtime?
If the IPCC’s 2013 report on everything from the net warming potential of C02 to the true extent of ice-loss in the Arctic, is a long list of best guesses ranging from “high probability” to “low probability”, with no mention of certainty, how do we even begin to justify dismissing and demonising people whose views of these probabilities may be different?
Note, I’m not saying “why do people believe in the reality of manmade climate change”? I absolutely understand why they do. It’s a very reasonable thing to believe. I’m asking specifically why we are being encouraged to consider doubt or even nuance should be expunged, when the IPCC and scientists on both sides acknowledge that doubt and nuance of varying degrees, and indeed complete absence of knowledge, inevitably goes with the territory?
Is the demand for the exclusion of certain points of view based on a) the fear the public may get confused by conflicting viewpoints and accidentally let the planet burn up, or b) the recognition this is a nice thin end of a very thick wedge?
Just as no one sane wants to encourage hate, no one rational wants to destroy the planet. It’s a pretty easy sell to persuade us that we shouldn’t listen, or give air time, to lunatics or shills who apparently want to let the oceans swallow the land and the skies boil.
I mean, I don’t want that to happen, do you?
Faced with a stark alternative, where we either censor the bad guys or let them usher in the end of the world, which side are we going to pick? Green David versus Goliath the Oil Monster, is a no-brainer; add in George Monbiot, or someone, pointing to the undeniably egregious suppression of the connection between smoking and lung cancer as proof that narrow special interests can confuse arguments and hinder progress, and we’re sold.
Let’s silence the pesky deniers and save the planet.
The argument is superficially persuasive because it’s partly true. Big Tobacco did use its clout to suppress inconvenient research and pay off scientists to lie or obfuscate, and this had a very negative impact on public health over many years. It’s reasonable to want to avoid that in future.
But let’s stop and think for a moment. How, in heaven’s name, is the fact Big Tobacco managed to suppress research and manipulate the debate an argument for censoring anyone?
What this case proves is the need for more openness and debate, not less. It proves that good science will win out over false representation, when both sides are given equal opportunity to be heard. It was Big Tobacco’s big bucks that kept the truth from coming out, not the principle of free speech. Imagine, forty years ago, Philip Morris International had been able to not simply suppress and distort but to label its critics “tobacco deniers” and demand their voice be banned from the airwaves for the good of humanity?
Are we supposed to believe this kind of suppression is a step forward, just because right now the perceived “good guys” are doing it? Or that the new age of “consensus-driven”, Avaaz-sponsored grass-roots endorsed censorship would only be used by the weak against the strong, truth against lies?
Are we supposed to believe, once we have set a precedent of denying the “deniers” and the “haters” their platform, the neoliberal media won’t pretty soon be labeling anyone their bosses don’t like a “denier” or a “hater” and demanding they be silenced or sent to jail?
And, if we can be persuaded to stop listening to one side of this argument can’t we most likely be persuaded to stop listening to one side of any argument.
Are we supposed to overlook the fact that while Goliath the Oil Monster certainly does fund climate skeptics, “Green David” is backed by some of the richest and most influential people on the planet?
No, once again, I’m not saying manmade climate change isn’t real. I’m saying, quite specifically, that the current drive to politicise and censor this debate has nothing to do with protecting truth or saving the planet and everything to do with attacking the most important principle of freedom.
I’m saying Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, Tom Steyer, the UN, NASA, NOAA, the IPCC, the EU, the Democratic Party et al can probably compete on equal terms with Big Oil.
I’m saying their message is getting across and the idea that manmade global warming is some underfunded grassroots campaign that needs special pleading to defend its corner is just another way of persuading people that censorship can be progressive.
I’m saying let’s stop buying that schtick.
I’m saying we need to reassert the fact that truth doesn’t require to be defended by censorship, government prosecution, or simplistic one-sided arguments.
Truth thrives in open debate and the exchange of ideas. It dies when one side is denied a voice because “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
And that is only more true when the truth may have a dozen billionaires and the entire neoliberal establishment advocating for it.
I’m saying that in a society of “believers” and “deniers” we all become Inquisitors, of each other and ourselves. We are currently encouraged by our betters to be Brown Shirts, dumb as a bag of hammers, zero-tolerant and proud of it, beating down unacceptable minority views with a big populist stick.
We are urged, not to arrive at opinions through analysis, but to just know what’s true, because the right people say so, because our Facebook friends give it a lot of likes, because it just is ok?
We don’t engage with different opinions any more, we scream at them until they go away or get put down.
I’m saying that as a modern day Milgram experiment this push to get intelligent, caring people to act like Salem witch hunters is interesting, demonstrating that the smartest, sanest person can be enjoined to act against their deepest ideals and even common sense, if given the proper cues.
We’re forgetting that the point of free speech is it guarantees a voice to the weaker party, the oppressed, the otherwise disenfranchised. And in the age of the internet this principle can be put into practice to a degree unimaginable.
This is why the powerful and the wealthy are currently trying to persuade us to fear and distrust each other. To hate in the name of anti-hate, silence in the name of progress.
Bit by bit. Voice by voice. Until the only sound left is the dispossessed lunatic scream.
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp George Orwell, 1984
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Yeah, yeah, I know I’m late to this debate but I’m going to post this anyway. The current wave of liberal anti-debate sweeping the western world is a complex phenomenon but it does have many similarities with the moral panics of the 1960s and 70s, as well as the disputed reaction to the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio hoax of the thirties.
Formerly reasonable people who have spent time in higher education reacted to the Trump phenomenon with all the perspective of a group of 5th year vegan kids who have just discovered that farm animals are used for food.
It was a very 21st Century witch-hunt.
They pointed fingers at imaginary racists, dropped the pathetic Hitler bomb at every turn and parroted cliches that sounded like something that might have fallen from the mouth of a 1973 Miss World contestant.
And then they marched, well wandered about a bit with placards, in an attempt to close down perfectly acceptable political ideas like stopping millions of illegal immigrants entering your country. These hopeless dweebs thought they had both the moral high ground and the intellectual one. In fact, they had neither.
The one thing they do posses is an incredibly small minded sense that their own half-baked emotions might be slightly dented if they don’t get their way. And from there, the world falls apart.
Oh, and man-made climate change. Of course it’s a lie, or mostly a lie. Come on people, you don’t seriously still buy into these fantasies do you? No-one has ever protesteth so much.
I thought it was generally excepted in scientific circles that global warming is a natural phenomenon that is being accelerated by human activity. The main argument seems, at least to me, to be how much humans are effecting this natural process.
For example, if it was natural for the next ice age to be triggered in about 2000 years, human activity effecting the climate by a mere 3% beyond normal could trigger it much sooner if the normal cycle is every 60,000 years. (That’s the off the top of my head example just to make a point. Don’t bust a spleen checking ice age records).
So, whether global warming is purely a natural phenomenon or a purely human one is a red herring. Tree hugging hippies will argue it’s human and oil guzzling fat cats will argue it’s natural if you pose the argument in those terms. Nothing would be achieved, by definition. So, what is important is, what effects human activity is having on the environment (regardless of global warming. In fact just forget about global warming for now).
Then we can focus on things like air quality, pollution control, clear oceans, recycling etc that benefit everybody. You know that there’s a lot of money to be made in recycling? It’s a multi billion dollar business. I’m sure the fat cats will happily become even fatter making profits cleaning up the mess they helped to make. It’s a win win for everyone.
You illuminate one important thing about the ‘global warming crusade’ and that is its capture and usurp of the environmental movement.
Such is the cultivation of any true movement of being as form for a subverted distortion. So mock not the movement in the heart – but mark the mimicry of deceits by which power of support seems to come to those who are fooled unknowing of their betrayal.
Joy in life and love of all that lives is no fairy tale, yet under deceit are the living made golems of their own destruction – even as they reach to save themself entraps them to such a course.
As for the science – consider that that which is fit for public consumption is released to such, and that which holds knowledge of such fundamental import as to change Everything from scare cities and debt to life more abundant – keeps it – so as to protect the darkness of which and within which they have adapted and grasped at power and possession in self-specialness that light reveals vain.
The new life is raised for sacrifice to the old power. The only movement in the heart that I would speak to, is the willingness to recognize such subjection to a false god from its forms of disguise and relinquish it from dictating our act and intent.
Knowledge cannot be denied those who are the willingness of its condition, and so learning is always available, excepting when locked into a mind certain it already knows and will listen not to any new messengers. Then you can lead to water or shout until you are deaf but nothing – nothing communicates – but is set and framed within a false narrative identity that sees breaking communication as safety and opening communication as threat. Thus hate is accorded power and love made to seem weak. Love of hate is but sacrifice of the gift of being to that which cannot see it and only feeds upon its subversion and death.
This illumination is not our damnation – for hiding it and keeping it secret is its protection – not ours. No one can change a choice they do not own or recognize they are making.
In metaphor – global warming might symbolize proximity to hell – for guilt, hate, fear and denial are its nature – as anyone can feel if they were not identified in such acts already. But conversely the exposure of pain of a hellish condition is the very basis from which to question EVERYTHING – that otherwise never would be challenged.
Whether knowingly intended or not, the insanity that can no longer be disguised rises up to open a Choice. I gave this choice a big C – because habit-patterns are a choice one does not know one is making, but the exposure makes that choice a Conscious act renewed or relinquished.
Under general belief, one is subject to the choices of others and of conditions largely beyond control. But mark how this is used to hide or keep secret, a hidden agenda. “Now look what you made me do!” See that trading in guilt by guile and deceit pre dates the demonisation of carbon life forms.
That science is as captured as every other human institutional endeavour should not really surprise – and yet of course the Trojans use the ‘horse’ that is MOST likely to gain acceptance and least likely to allow challenge or critical perspective. To those who know they are hostage to lies – only lies protect them from mass rejection and hatred – so they are perforce complied to wind up the torture for others in exchange for some passing show in which to justify their escape in terms of trickster thinking they get others to validate them in acting out.
Sovereignty is not of a ‘nation’ but of a true will. Authority is authored in true witness. Power is not used but aligned or balanced within. Love rules out fear and division – not BY fear and division. The true or original meaning of being remains un-coverable from the coverings of what we (our minds) make. So whenever we speak or write – we can monitor that we know what we mean and we mean what we know – rather than running and weaving with someone else’s thinking. False framing is when ‘as if’ is asserted and defended ‘as is’.
Who does not hate to be denied and deprived of their will? But is it truly our will (true desire) or is a mindset between our heart and thought that says “I WANT IT THUS!” and hates to lose? We may laugh at the tantrum of a two year old who thinks to rule the world, but comply when such a mentality has hacked the thinking that makes the world and effectively tells it what to think. Do not underestimate the power given to hate – and that it feeds upon hate as a living sacrifice. But a hate is a hurt that is denied feeling so as to enact ‘power’ in vengeance.
The ghost in the machine is a ‘denial spirit’ – not the Unified Field from which nothing can really be apart from. Despite the meanings given to the forms they take – everything denied and disowned that is part of you as you are Part Of a Whole – is always seeking to reintegrate to your awareness. Deceits operate to persist in playing apart, despite the cost exacted, as a core addiction to a game that isn’t worth the candle. So give your light to what is truly worthy of honour and recognition in any moment you remember you have light – or persist in cursing the darkness while it hollows and swallows what might have been – but was unheeded, ignored, abandoned, unchosen.
When you write these replies are you sitting with your legs crossed inside a pentagram? I just had that image as I read your reply and made me laugh. Seriously, I might need to decompress your response one word at a time to figure out what you’re saying.
The symbology of your imagining me is your own – but my response is direct and not via any kind of magical invocation or ritual.
The trick of the mind IS magic – or an appeal to magical solutions that redistribute psychic-emotional energy so as to SEEM to have solved a conflict – when actually it has merely been redefined – or re-framed in ways that accord a temporary power to the aligning in its judgement.
I think it was in reply to you that I noted the power of illusions as distinct from the illusion of power (?) – but in any case the image, symbol and concept of reality – of YOU aware of your existence – however you conceive and perceive this to be – is the power of illusion – for these are always changing and nothing abides or ‘survives’ even from one moment to the next – for every instant is new – even for one replicating boredom amidst Infinity.
Writing about (in willingness for feeling what is being written of) will seem either trite and easily overlooked as in (I am that I am) – or impossibly dense in the use of symbol and concept to reflect the use of symbol and concept.
In any case, as we use our mind so are we used thereby – according to the purpose held in desire.
So an individual and collective intent to use – in the sense of subject and manipulate life – suffers subjection and victim-hood. Each aligning separately in what seems power against the other, the obstacle or the feare-d-evil of dis-owned and unresolved experience.
In using the mind as a communication device or channel – it functions as a musical instrument to the music through it – and this is not a sense of coercion from ‘above’ nor martyred sacrifice to above, but of aspirational alignment in what we uncover as our joy. This inherently ‘shares’ or extends itself freely to the free-willingness of alignment in.
So regardless the full or intended meanings of what I write – you and others can feel the ‘tune’ and tune in – to where YOUR joy alights and where YOUR recognition of Life stirs as the movement of YOUR being. AND you may meet and feel the tightness of the mask and feel its discomfort – for its ‘rules’ are the conditions you think need to be met for you to be complete or validated in struggle and a sense of self over and against a life and world of war.
If you look up ‘apocalypse’ you see many fearful definitions of the ‘destruction of the world’ The ‘end of the world’ – but it simply means the uncovering – and I will include in that, the uncovering of the tricks of the mind by which we maintain a false sense of fragmentation, disconnection, scarcity and conflict – and experience all at the hand of the ‘other’, the obstacle, the adversary, the enemy, the failure and betrayal of life to meet or bend to our demands. That ‘world’ is a fear-augmented reality experience of a fragmented polarised breakdown of communication. Seeing without the mind is presence but who will abide it and be abided in?
I don’t know if any of this resonates with you this day – but it is what found itself in the sharing as the result of meeting your response. I paused then and reconsidered the page context and link to the main page subject thus:
In a society locked into unconscious beliefs and denials, we all become inquisitors to prevent the unlocking, and opening of our mind in attempt to save ourself from the destruction or annihilation that such fear-beliefs set the mind to seal off or excommunicate. Yet is it not obvious by now that we are embodying and bringing about exactly such feared outcomes by the very means we thought were our power of protection from them?
Better late than never.
What I don’t understand is why this word liberal is used to pin everything that’s wrong in the world on like a 21st Century witch-hunt?
‘Liberal’. Meanings of terms mutate and change – particularly as a result of mind reframing and scapegoat-projection or name, blame and shame (invalidate or kill). Naming is spelling is magic. That is – an imaginative (augmentation of) Reality – operated from AS true.
Mind-framing aka ‘narrative control’ could be seen as a war on Consciousness – but note – there is no outside by which to lever – but there is the framing or setting up of conflicting exclusive polarities of split self-identity – each of which is the ‘death’ of the other, and both of which unite against being brought together in an embracing whole of conscious acceptance.
Thus the protection from Consciousness is a split identity, kept in secret, whose conflict is more openly asserted as a sense of righteous justification predicated upon seeking and finding all that is wrong with the Other.
That secrets and lies operate in place of open communication is an indicator of valuing secrets and lies more than communication – and the last place we bring to communication is our own sense of split identity – in fact ‘narrative control’ operates a fearsome and tyrannous defence against looking within as a simple curiosity of a desire to know.
While there are ways in which we see observable effects – as a movement of change in which we feel participation – for the most part we are meeting our lives unseeing – for they are being played out in an externalised rendering of our own shifting inner conflicts.
Judgement operates a self assertive expression of such a past impression. Consciousness has been excluded by the replay of a past conflict-trigger. This is like saying that light is denied and replaced by a false, and in the dark, secrets can be hidden and lies can pass off true.
The only way to access discernment, is by noting but not reacting from judgement. We have layers of secrets and lies beneath our various and conflicting judgements. That’s what the mask of defence is and does.
Amidst secrets and lies arising to notice are all the primal triggers – of terror and of rage – and the spectrum of a sense of lack assigned in guilt and fear. Keeping that hidden, in forms that seem to overcome or re-distribute and outsource pain (at cost of consciousness), is the prime directive of the survival instinct of the split-minded sense of self. Yet this survival instinct operates the tares in the wheat – for it sacrifices Life to a false narrative mind that allows a fragment to persist in promise of seeming power that never becomes real – but desecrates, hollows out and lays waste.
That there is “nothing new under the Sun” pertains to patterns of consciousness templated before memory can stretch back to uncover – yet re-enacting as the augmented ‘reality’ of the Human Conditioning.
The ‘movement’ of the desire to share Life – rather than sacrifice it to private gratification, is a movement within an intimacy of being – contra to the movement that demanded and set the mask. Honesty of being is undefended to all that you are. Secrets and lies ‘protect’ who you thought you were from what you fear to acknowledge. Who shouts first and loudest is seeking to hide from themselves and their fellows. But where darkness is desired, the rest will follow as directed, that an Other will pay the price they believe would be exacted of them. This usurping of the fear of God – has NO basis in the actuality of a Conscious Embracing Whole. For when you are aware of the movement of the mask AND the desire to know and be known truly – you are in a point of discernment as to what you choose and why you do so – and this can only grow self-awareness and the light in which to choose in place of symbolic associations given sacrifice in exchange for a sense of power to augment or cover over a powerlessness made into a personal sense of lack. But a lack of power to DO life is the very condition in which Life moves through you – as insight, discernment, inspiration, encouragement and support for being you.
“Behold I make all things new” witnesses to an Innate Innocence of being that is beneath the augmented narrative ‘reality experience’. True disillusionment is awake to the power of illusion, and free from the illusion of power. That our world is predicated for Forgetting is the deep habit of choices made before Consciousness stirred. But in light is the capacity to pause and reflect – not in triggered mind-programs – but in reception to wholeness that such mind cannot see. But you – released from its filtering distortion – can see, feel and recognize yourself uniquely within – but not alone, apart and special. That’s the wish of ‘elitism’ claiming power and enraged at being denied and deprived it. But if you have and are the power to be the true of you, now – and now – and in any now of a willingness to pause and feel to know – then that is the true context of your relations with everyone and everything in its due timing.
I’d make global warming denial a crime against humanity. Why shouldn’t it be?
stupidity is a bigger crime against humanity, but you’re walking around free.
It’s not stupid to want to stop people dying from global warming, is it?
It’s stupid to think you can punish people for their opinion and not end up in a Big Brother state.
Have you even studied global warming? Do you even know what the science is about? Or are you just kneejerk hating people the MSM has told you to hate?
That’s why you’re stupid.
So you don’t think people should be jailed for holding the opinion that all people who are members of some religion or ethnicity should be eradicated? You’d have Hitler wandering around spreading his hate with impunity. Have we learned nothing?
And then you ask me a load of questions and call me stupid without even having the courtesy to wait for an answer.
If what you call global warming was in fact the depopulator you are led to believe – it would likely be kept secret.
Corporate pollution – well there’s a KILLER! Go after them CherryRedGuitar and get them to stop!
The air, the water, the soil, the food – oh and sort out the Media for selling their readers toxic ‘news’ that poisons the mind with managed despair. Why do you watch that stuff?
Why shouldn’t I go after them for both pollution and for global warming?
“I don’t”, is the answer to your last question.
Because pollution is genocide and GW is a cover story with no actual deaths, deformities, disease or disabilities. Its in your head because someone put it there – and you let them. The true nature of genocidal corporate cartels and banksters is not in your awareness or you would not be so open to being manipulated with what seems on surface to make sense – saving lots of people from dying. Surely anyone who doesn’t support that WANTS all these people to die?
Can you not see how false flag works? Cry “Wolf!” and point – “over there!”, and while everyone attends over there – you are the wolf – or its ‘asset’. I learned that as a basic course in blame diversion of getting away with it while also scoring over another while they take the blame. Its the use of the lie to support a wish to be top dog – or bring the top dog down – or set the other dogs into trouble. But it was all around blame, punishment and evasion. Fear of shame, penalty and loss of face and power – accounts for using the lie – in which to seem like the good guy – or be seen throwing the stone at the ‘bad guy’.
Sorry, I didn’t know that you were a tinfoilhatter.
I used to argue with a guy who seriously thought that nuclear weapons and nuclear power both didn’t exist. The conspiracy needed for his theory to be true was absolutely enormous, but it was still smaller than the conspiracy needed for global warming to be false.
Beneath another post, you write:
To that I more or less replied:
I patiently await your reply.
Simple answer. Because denying something that doesn’t exist – that all the evidence says is a lie – cannot be a crime. But that’s how the system messes with people’s minds – for obvious reasons. First tell a big lie, then denounce anyone who challenges it as a “conspiracy theorist”, or – even worse – a “denier”. We are then made to live in a topsy-turvy world where black is white and 2+2=5.
All it takes is for there to be an original conspiracy – the one engaged in by those (always powerful interests) who want to concoct the lie for commercial, political or other reasons – then for their concoction to be adopted and massively, endlessly promoted and repeated by the servile MSM and political, academic and other prostitutes … until the lie takes on the appearance of truth and the guilty (or mad) are those who refuse to accept it.
9/11 is a classic instance. It has been exposed a million times as an inside job, and polls indicate that majorities in many countries no longer accept the official story – but that doesn’t stop the demonisation of people who challenge it; or, as in the case of the European science mag which first accepted and published the scientific article by AE911truth and only later (presumably after being pressured) accused the authors of spreading “conspiracy theories”.
We have the same phenomenon with AGW. The ‘official story’ is hogwash, completely undermined by the facts. Yet it has become the new ‘dogma’ (no different essentially from a hardline religious dogma) which must not be opposed.
It would be funny if it was not so serious. In a sense, since there is no global warming and therefore no threat – at least from CO2 – to the earth, the dogma is laughable. What is not laughable is that countless millions of good people everywhere have been persuaded to believe yet another claim by some supposed ‘authority’ that is not true. That is destructive for the human spirit and extremely dangerous politically.
My comment was a response to CherryRedGuitar’s “making global warming denial a crime”. I don’t know why it appears as a response to NP’s excellent comment!
Denier = One who denies.
This is the second article I’ve read in my short time here which seeks to insert doubt into the global warming debate. Global warming deniers have to ignore a mountain of evidence to arrive at their views. They deserve the name.
The real message of this article has completely passed you by hasn’t it
I was commenting about the one part of the article which caught my eye. Am I only allowed to comment on what you think is “the real message”?
You’re free to comment in any way you choose, but it might be helpful if you read what you’re commenting on first.
‘Well a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest”
~ Simon and Garfunkle – The Boxer
Doubt is a fact of life in climate science. Everyone who knows anything, from the IPCC to the most complete skeptic KNOWS doubt is a fact of life in this discipline. The only people who think there is no doubt are the non-scientists who get their “science” from newspaper headlines and popular documentaries.
Even the IPCC is only prepared to claim around half the recent warming is (with 95% confidence) due to man, Which means even the gurus of AGW accept up to 50% of the current warming could be due to natural forces.
Yes – I missed it first time – but the framing of ‘inserting doubt’ into (a) global warming (debate). Assumes there otherwise is NONE – in which case there is of course no ‘debate’.
Once UN-settled by fear and guilt – the mind may be unable to stay open but feels compelled to ‘DO something!!!” as a fight or flight response.
Hence I feel to examine the fear and guilt so as not to be manipulated by them.
Fear of catastrophe?
CO2 is hardly a toxic candidate. The greenhouse effect is a very simplistic model within a much more complex living system. As I indicate elsewhere on this page, I feel there are many candidates of a more toxic and catastrophic nature – that this issue operates diversion from.
Guilt for messing up our Planet… is not altogether unfounded – but indulging guilt while persisting in the same mindset is the sinner who self-denies – vilifies others who dont also sacrifice, and consent to be managed by technocratic priesthood for their own good.
But the sin is not using the wrong light bulbs – so much as the nature of corporate Industrial plunder, exploitation and degradation of people and environment for private gratifications that evaporate to leave a wasteland.
At what point does the Prodigal remember his father?
So what exactly does the Climate Change Political Agenda offer? Really? What solution is offered to what problem and what risks? – AND benefits!
A society needs either a positive aspiration or a negative threat in common to align in common purpose and the managing, control, and predation upon society can no longer pretend the former and so resorts to any and every trigger of fear and guilt to unsettle and herd people into the thinking they supply.
so restating: I feel to examine the fear and guilt so as not to be manipulated by them. There’s a surface matrix by which to keep a lid over it – a lid that gives what lies beneath all the power fear assigns it. Fear can miscreate false reality experience and guilt can lock the door behind you.
But the framing of the mind is the deceit. Without vigilance of the mind of conditioned reaction – what is taken to be conscious runs a diversion. No one uncovers what they are unwilling to know.
Yes, stick to healthy margerine and ETC! and trust to corporately managed mind-capture.
Why do people – institutions and media participate in lies?
Because a false self-interest operates within denial of true or ‘narrative control’.
I don’t need to ‘deny’ climate change, to give no time to a fear-mongering and guilt tripping agenda.
Regardless the ‘facts’ – such as completely derailing and subverting genuine environmental issues.
I hold freedom sacred. I see we mostly run scared of freedom – because freedom to feel and know upsets the world enforced by denial. But in truth – if given a chance – it would enliven and enrich. Change may be feared, and totally over-managed and thus blocked – but it is also life’s unfolding. False and forced emotionalism veils a loveless agenda. I don’t suppose you are really listening – but then you can wield the ‘denial’ judgement in righteous alignment with authorised reality. CO2 is a Good Thing for Planet Earth! The full spectrum dominance of toxins that are systematically and knowingly poisoning us, our world and our yet to be born are NOT Good.
Maybe you could look up the whistleblower on ‘organic’ bio-solids and get a reading on the current state of scientific integrity. I say to you that the actual human situation is MUCH more horrific than the Climate Change hysteria – but is here and now and pervasive and ongoing and hidden in plain sight. Denial is the basis of a partitioned consciousness that ‘escapes’ by diversion and displacement – and yet the very nature of its ‘defence’ DOES the very thing it claims to address. “Hate the haters; deny the deniers and regroup against the demonized outcome or of course… you penalized as a traitor”.
What’s with the ‘weather modification’ tech that has been brought out as if under the Climate Protection Mandate – but has been running for years and fills the skies with nano-particles of crap (oh I could wish it was just crap). Don’t you know that sunscreens are carcinogenic and block the beneficence of Sunlight – while aluminium – a very useful adjutant (sic) – is really bad news to your gut and brain function. (But don’t link to autism or you’ll be vilified and shut down).
If you put the Climate for primate change at the top of your list – you prioritize everything to fight and flight that one hypothetical issue and thus deny all else. That’s the way to keep OUT the light in which Seeing naturally occurs because nothing is getting in the way.
The real argument is whether human-induced global warming due to carbon dioxide is dangerous or not.
Climate has warmed and cooled for millions of years without the help of humans. It has done so over temperature ranges far greater than the changes since 1650.
The hypothesis you have to prove is that the rate of warming and its amplitude is unprecedented.
You will have a significant challenge, me thinks…..
One man’s – or woman’s – denier is another person’s pursuer of truth. Slapping a stupid label like ‘denier’ on someone is meaningless if the labeller hasn’t taken the trouble to look at the evidence, but is just slavishly following some dogma. This kind of mindless, uninformed, knee-jerk reaction to challenge and refusal to question ‘authority’ is what allows oppressive political, religious and other systems to flourish.
WHAT AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Thank You!
This analysis goes really deep: “The starting point is always the fallacy that we can establish truth to a degree that makes further discussion of evidence unnecessary and doubt a sort of crime. Once we know the Truth, the argument goes, we don’t really need free speech any more. In fact free speech in a time of established Truth becomes a regressive force, since it will enable those who don’t believe the Truth, or who are paid to besmirch it, to lead the unwary from the path of certainty into darkness and doubt.
If that sounds like religious fundamentalism it’s because essentially that’s what it is. It’s the fundamentalism of a post-deist world“.
Most of humanity is being herded into the NWO global plantation, where original thoughts, lively debates or even books that show a different history other than the one that has been dripped incessantly into our minds, get beaten, jailed or Amazon will burn your books.
Take to the streets to peacefully assemble, and you’ll have state-backed goons tagging along, causing property destruction, giving the police the excuse to stomp in, swinging clubs and spraying tear gas.
Go online and offer up a different view, and your thoughts will be wiped away, and you’ll be banned from further discussion, as if you didn’t exist and in a way, you no longer do.
Such is life in the Gulag which we are all being assigned.
Tell a story enough times, you start to believe it…
I have to agree here, Greg: all too often in the last two years my comments have simply been wiped out of existence, especially if I post books to back my views.
Trolls have been assigned to denigrate, insult & harass & I have grown to enjoy these encounters.
I remember once my remarks being wiped in front of my eyes as I was typing!
The book I was recommending was Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin, which shows the Malthusian/Darwinian/Eliteist Brit Empire backgroud of the present overpopulation/climate scam. It also shows how safe & clean nuclear power is being demonised through the now discredited mainstream media & suppressed through over-regulation.
Zubrin is a PhD nuclear engineer with 9 patents to his name or pending.
Anyone who thinks we have free speech now, apart from one to one conversations, labours under a misapprehension.
John Doran.
So a) Zubrin is not a “specialist” on the effects of low level radiation on the biosphere, and especially not on its disruptive and illness inducing effects once low level radiation emitters have been synthesized into a living organism; and b) with 9 patents pending to his name, there is absolutely no possible “financial” incentive behind his enthusiastic pro-nuclear stance?
Since you are all about evidence and expert testimony, consider this:
The ICRP’s radiation risk model is bogus science — Chris Busby
and
Aspects of DNA Damage from Internal Radionuclides — Dr. Christopher Busby
Hiroshima & Nagasaki were habitable one year after being bombed. Fukushima & Three Mile Island, zero radiation deaths. Chernobyl was a poor Soviet design wrecked by dumb technicians. Max deaths? Perhaps 4000. The US has had safe clean nuclear submarines since the 1950s. Research Galen Winsor on youtube.
Go to www,cfact.org & look up there was no fukushima nuclear…
Read Zubrin’s & Simon’s books & get back to me.
Both are more than well worth the read.
Coal -fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear ones.
Radiation Doses from Natural & Artificial Sources
Blood (human)…20mrem/yr
Building Materials…35mrem/yr
food…25mrem/yr
soil…11mrem/yr
Cosmic Rays (sea level)…35mrem/yr
Cosmic Rays (Denver Alt)…70mrem/yr
Medical X-rays…100mrem/yr
Air Travel (NY to LA round trip…5mrem
Nuclear power plant (limit at property line)…5mrem/yr
Nuclear ” plants ( dose to General Public)…0.01mrem/yr
Average annual dose to general public…270mrem/yr
Human blood contains potassium 40.
Nuclear, IMHO, is demonised to keep us enslaved to oil, in which the 1%s have $Billions invested in infrastructure.
There are now safe liquid salt Fluoride/Thorium designs which can eat up conventional nuclear waste as fuel, doing away with that problem.
Please. The physicists make their claims. The experts in biology and medicine make theirs.
The physicists, who have a stake in the nuclear power industry, are in charge of the “medical and environmental risk models.”
So what do you think will be the most likely BIAS of those risk models? And low and behold, wouldn’t you know it, the experts in medicine have EMPIRICAL data to back up their claims, whereas the physicists simply ignore that data because it doesn’t fit in with their professional preconceptions.
Who do you think has a better grasp on the incidence and causes of diseases? The most cogent explanations? The most complete data on the incidence and distribution? The guys who build the machines and get rich from building the machines, or the guys who study organisms and whose research and conclusions are actively suppressed?
Do you think Busby has no clue about natural background radiation? Do you think he is oblivious to the more or less innocuous EXTERNAL effects of low level radiation emitters?
The problems arise from INGESTING particles that emit radiation, and the more of those you have in the environment, the more likely it will be that they will be ingested and the more problems you will end up with that are KNOWN to be related to those kinds of emitters when ingested and synthesized by an organism as components in its essential chemistry.
Describe for us the physiological functions mimicked by strontium 90 and cesium 137. How are they taken up and assimilated by the human organism or any other. And once assimilated in that fashion, are there emissions external or internal, and might there be a difference between those categories of emissions and the severity of their effects? And what of “hot particles” inhaled? What do they do? How do they behave? Are those internal or external emissions?
Nuclear energy is clean??? Don’t let me pop your world.
I can’t demand anyone listen – or allow my voice. I venture freedoms as I feel them – and for freedom as I recognize it.
In a film I haven’t seen, Richard Gere is acting the part of someone being taught to dance. His teachers says; “don’t move until you feel the movement!”. The past cannot control the present but the attempt to do so loses awareness of presence.
There is a ‘world’ out of its timing, in displaced, misidentification. The attempt to force it into shape, CANNOT dance – but only mimic life in macabre and grotesque simulation – against which we make symbols of a life we can’t completely cover over or deny.
Freedom does not exist outside of relational being – and the belief it does – is your loss of awareness of relational being in attempt to give life to a golem and get it to act out your fantasy.
We each and together make a framework of limitation and constraint called the world – and within that – its social and political demands and requirements. The idea that our life would be fulfilled or resumed if we could change the world and make it right, makes for a lot of competing cooks in the same kitchen, and all the focus is drawn there, as if that is the vector of real change. Meanwhile the programming runs unnoticed. The ‘smart’ cooks learn about programming but only as a way to set the menu – and seem to have secret weapons by which to get everyone else to do what they are reprogrammed to do while believing they are free – or in pursuit of freedoms.
But this cat and mouse game brings the realm of the programming into focus – for it runs beneath the world or the mind that operates the world – as unconscious and subconscious belief, desire and intent.
The nature of splitting the mind to ‘conscious’, sub-conscious and unconscious, is itself an act of consciousness – but one cannot solve a problem within the framing of its set. One has to reach out – and the fact is that the ego has no capacity whatsoever to ‘know’ anything outside its box. There is nothing outside the box – the box is reality – is the belief in “what’s in it for me” – which is a blind getting mechanism that also develops consciousness to the point of boxed in and stuck!
There is always and already a movement of being – as the function or purpose of existence – but because it Is being all that you are – you cannot make it an object of your thought or awareness – excepting as you are moved to give – even as you receive. When life moves you – and you embrace this without forcing it into your box – you release and expand the sense of limitation to an alignment in being – that opens as a fresh or connected perspective in which pathways and opportunities open that were unseen or closed off before.
Speech is an embodiment of the movement to communicate – but it can also be used as the control and coercion upon the movement that rules out or denies life – in order to self-elect oneself its priest, guardian, expert or protector and set the right over the wrong.
“… the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen, to determine who will serve and who will eat”
(Leonard Cohen – Democracy).
Awakening intelligence is the spontaneous recognition of a pattern as a pattern – and thus discerning of its underlying motive and belief. Without ANY mental process an obsolete or useless belief falls away to the focus within what is truly aligned in – and of.
Regardless the programmed emotional response-triggers – bring attention present instead of operating a preset of a captured attention. A pause of reactive mind – in which a movement of curiosity opens a recognition.
My willingness to seek an articulation of freedom of being reaches to a like willingness in others. I cannot be free to be what I am NOT – excepting in simulation given energy of an exclusive attention. But by the same token I am free to uncover the more of who I am – with you, instead of the illusion of who I am not, held against you – and made ‘real’ by competing for validation, as if the right must needs seek and hold the wrong by which to seem to be validated, real, authorised, vindicated, justified.
“…It’s here the family’s broken, and it’s here the lonely say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way –
Democracy is coming to the USA” ~ (L.C as above)
The will of the people is both individually and collectively embodied, of conscious and unconscious belief and desire. Narrative control never was or can be the control of reality – so much as the continuity manager for accepted reality. We vote with our feet, our focus and our freedom to feel and know our choice. Now and now and always now.
Is there not a qualitative and a quantitive nature to our thought and consciousness? Does the overwhelming majority in a quantitative easement outweigh the recognition of qualitative worth and freedom?
Is this not the same as comparing fear of loss, with the embrace of true desire?
In the former is the strategy of competing and conflicting interest, and the other is truly interesting – perhaps at times, challenging – but transformational and connected as un unfolding of connected being. One shouldn’t have to qualify being – for its nature is connected – but having learned to operate a ‘disconnected’ sense of self and believe or make it real – reality is made homeless.
It doesn’t matter what anyone else says or believes – but what we each accept true of ourself – so freedom of speech exists only in the freedom to receive or hear what is said – and this is a balancing within ourselves – and together – that is what the core inspiration for ‘democracy’ moves in me. Not a mob rule – but outcomes from a genuine willingness of communication. A lack of which, cannot even imagine such as the true nature of being – for it has to force outcomes – or block them – and sacrifice everything to that dictate. But can we truly lack the willingness for living, or is it covered over and believed lost? And at the hand and fault of a past beyond repair? Or as conditional demands unmet by which we set ourselves up to fail?
We are only free to embody the nature of what we accept true – in any given moment. The usurping of the idea of free will operates the box – the shrinking box that believes it is expanding or creating through the process of fragmentation of identity. Free to embrace paralysis and hollowness as the nature over which to proclaim victory in death – for what other outcome could replace or substitute for life?
“If it were not for the last minute, nothing would ever get done,” ~ Rita Mae Brown.
Read Zubrin’s book & get back to me.
I also recommend Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2
Enjoy.
Yes, and because Zubrin is also and without doubt and expert in radiological-epidemiological research, those reads should be accompanied by these articles and others like them as well as by the sources they reference:
Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000, Mostly from Cancer
&
<a href=”http://www.globalresearch.ca/chernobyl-genetic-damage-and-the-uk-nuclear-bomb-tests-justice-at-last/5523757>Chernobyl, Genetic Damage, and the UK Nuclear Bomb Tests – Justice at Last?
I like GR.ca – on politicss & economics only.
On the environment & nuclear? Worse than useless. This scare story is about the least scientific reporting I’ve ever seen, reminiscent of the worst warming/climate lies. The 4000 figure I’ve quoted derives from a definitive IAEA 2005 report. I’ll see if I can find a ref.
JD.
The Chernobyl Forum, Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental, &Socioeconomic Impacts (Vienna, Austria: IAEA, 2005), page 16
Zubrin, interestingly, does not mention the liquid salts options: his focus is fusion.
If you read around a subject a little, you spot this stuff. 🙂
JD.
My reply was just disappeared.
Go on youtube & put in Witness the nuclear fear scam. Scientist eats Uranium
6 mins
Yes, references are a good thing.
That one’s gibberish, I’m afraid. 🙁
Please.
Tell us “who” is in charge of the “IAEA” risk model? The medical community or the physicists and representatives of the nuclear industry.
Why don’t we start with just that question before getting down and dirty with the “gibberish,” as you dismissivle call it.
I meant that literally. I click on that link, all I get is a page full of gibberish, whatever. The link does not work for me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmJN-LMPnX0
Witness the nuclear fear scam. Scientist eats Uranium
6 mins
Perhaps you’d care to research this & tell me?
Be patient. The information is coming. One little thing at a time. This is an important issue on which to engage. I’m glad you brought it up.
Why dilogue when you make a book list instead?
There are innumerable accounts of leaking radiation – denials and cover ups, failure to properly dispose of contaminants and the astronomical costs of decommissioning the earlier generation of power stations.
Are you carbon-blind?
There is also a cartel-corporatocracy that suppresses rival development of energy supply – unless it owns and controls and decides to use it in a way that preserves its revenue stream and related privileges.
As an opening gambit, to pinpoint the issue of contention between the “medical community” and the so called “health pysicist,” a longish but accessible quote (and hopefully the formatting isn’t going to end up to badly mangled):
Quote begins:
The question of the health effects of internal radionuclide exposures began to be asked in the early 1950s when there was widespread fallout contamination of food and milk from atmospheric nuclear tests. It quickly became the subject of disagreements between two committees of the newly formed International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP)[1]. The questions of the equivalence of internal and external radiation exposure, which were the basis of these disagreements, have still not been resolved. In the West, up to very recently, the whole spectrum of health effects from internal incorporated radionuclides has focused on animal studies of Radium, Plutonium and Strontium-90 and human retrospective studies of those individuals exposed to Radium-226 and Thorium-232 in the contrast medium “Thorotrast”. These studies suffer from a number of problems which will be discussed.
Soviet scientists were more interested in internal radiation effects from fission-product radionuclides, but unfortunately their valuable studies have been difficult to access since they are published in Russian. In 1977 Gracheva and Korolev published a book summarising work in this area which was translated in India in 1980 as Genetic Effects of the Decay of Radionuclides in Cells [2]. This presented a wealth of interesting data relating to beta emitter genetic effects in various systems and drew attention to the distinction that must be made between external and internal radiation. This is important since the whole assessment of radiation in terms of health has been through the quantity “absorbed dose” and what can be called the bag-of-water model. In this bag of water model, illustrated in Fig 1, the total energy transferred by the radiation to living tissue is diluted into a large mass, greater than a kilogram, as if the effects were uniform throughout the tissue being considered. In Fig 1 the tissue mass A represents an external irradiation by X-rays or gamma rays and here the effects are uniform across the tissue. But in the case B, for internal irradiation, it is clear that it is possible, for certain kinds of exposure, for tissue local to the source to receive very large amounts of radiation energy at the same overall energy transfer to the tissue mass.
[Norm’s note: I could not include the figure. My html skills are limited, unfortunately.]
Figure 1. Comparing external and internal irradiation: the ICRP/ ICRU bag of water model. In case A, external radiation (X-rays or gamma rays) there are 20 events uniformly spaced throughout the tissue and the “absorbed dose” (see text) at any microscopic point is evenly distributed. In case B, for internal irradiation (here from a radioactive particle) there is a very large transfer of energy to a small tissue volume and the concept of “absorbed dose” does not apply.
Thus, in the historic and also the current system of radiation protection, those experts who assess radiation risk, who are termed Health Physicists, calculate the cumulative absorbed dose in Grays, i.e. in terms of the total energy in Joules imparted by the beta electron or alpha particle decays of the internal radionuclide contamination to one kilogram of tissue. For this calculation, the tissue is modelled as water. For example, those whose body contains 100 Bq of Strontium-90 are assessed, for the purposes of radiation protection, as having received a cumulative absorbed dose of 100 x w where w is the “cumulative (absorbed) dose coefficient”, obtained from measurements of the biological half life of the Strontium in the body and the decay energy of each decay in Joules. This number w is to be found in a Table published by the ICRP. In the case of the Strontium-90 contaminated individual, if the person weighed 50 kg, then the mean activity concentration would be 2 Bq/kg. The resulting absorbed dose would then be 2 x 2.8 x 10-8 (this is the ICRP 72 dose coefficient [3]). In other words, the committed dose is 5.6 x 10-8 Sv (0.056 μSv). But can this be safely compared with a dose from a chest X-ray (40 μSv) or from natural background radiation (2500 μSv) or from a high dose acute exposure to gamma rays from an atomic bomb linearly scaled to zero dose (the current way of modelling radiation effects)? This chapter explores this question. It is one which has become increasingly necessary as serious health effects, including cancer and leukemia, have been reported in those exposed to internal radioactivity in areas contaminated by radionuclides released from nuclear sites, weapons testing fallout and accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, at very low conventionally calculated “absorbed doses”. The matter has been discussed in some detail since 1998 by the independent European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) whose reports [4, 5] provide a methodology for assessing health effects through a system of weighting factors based on available data. As more and more evidence emerged after 1995 that something was very wrong with the ICRP absorbed dose approach to internal radiation, the UK government set up a Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters (CERRIE). Since there were (and are) political dimensions to the issue, the committee was composed of scientists and experts from the nuclear industry and the official radiation protection organisations in the UK. Unfortunately the 4-years process ended in acrimony, legal threats to member of the committee, and failure to agree a final report. Two reports were issued [6, 7]. However, there was agreement that there were reasonable concerns about the safety of employing “absorbed dose” for certain internal radionuclide situations, and similar concerns about the safety of the ICRP model were made in 2005 by the French IRSN [8]. The error factor that these discussions led to was believed by different ends of the CERRIE process to be between 10-fold and 1000-fold. More recently, the value put on this error factor by the retired Scientific Secretary of the ICRP at a meeting in Stockholm in 2009 was “two orders of magnitude”. What this means, in our Strontium-90 case above, is that the dose from 100Bq contamination to the whole body is no longer 0.056μSv but may now be between 0.56μSv and 56μSv and the risk of fatal cancer is proportionately increased. To put this in perspective, the mean Sr-90 dose over the period 1959-1963 to individuals in the northern hemisphere was given as about 1 mSv [9]. The ICRP risk model gives a 0.45% per Sievert excess lifetime cancer risk. Epidemiological studies suggest that the cancer “epidemic” which began in the 1980s in areas of high rainfall and fallout is a consequence of the earlier fallout exposures [10]. The weighting of dose necessary to explain this is greater than 300 if calculated from the ICRP absolute risk factor of 0.05/Sv [5, 11]. Many other instances of anomalous health effects from exposure to internal radionuclides require hazard weighting factors of between 100-fold and more than 1000-fold, and these are consequences of mechanisms which will be presented.
quote ends.
Source: See the link already provided to the .pdf document titled, “Aspects of DNA Damage from Internal Radionuclides — Dr. Christopher Busby,” pp.597-599. (as paginated from the original, not the .pdf, document)
It strikes me that we continue to discuss and debate “Free Speech” as though we actually have it. If there is one thing you are forbidden from saying (all clichés about “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater aside, since that shout is only “speech” in the most literal sense), you have no “Free Speech”… and there are dozens of things, that I can think of, that are taboo… shading from the mildly-controversial (something about “overweight models”, for example) to the generally offensive (something about concentration camps, for example).
As I’ve stated before, around these parts: what we have is “Cheap Speech”. “Free Speech” we don’t have. We should talk about that.
I agree with you. These efforts to constrain public discourse are all part of the same attack. Self-censorship is as important as literal censorship. But we do at least at the moment have the principle of free speech still regarded as sacrosanct. Once we’re persuaded to abandon that things will only get rapidly worse.
“But we do at least at the moment have the principle of free speech still regarded as sacrosanct.”
That’s the trick, isn’t it? We defend the Virtual Version of a Real Supposed Right like vigilant goal tenders, in dramatic stances, in front of a goal stuffed with balls! Laugh
“Free speech” is first and foremost a state of mind.
If it were to become a widespread “cultural” state of mind, what could the ruling establishment really do about it?
And anyway, the ruling establishment cannot extirpate it entirely, otherwise they would be denying themselves of the potential of ever truly “knowing” anything or of learning anything new, and their power and their bureaucracies and their institutions of learning would grind to halt in terms of their usefulness.
So as much as they try to contain the fire, they must of necessity keep it burning here and there, always running the risk that it might spread out of their control, for they do need of necessity a segment of their working force to be both highly educated and free thinking and dedicated to standards intellectual integrity that implicitly brings this segment of the workforce potentially into conflict with a manipulative, scheming, exploitative, brutal and Machiavellian ruling class. As Marx put it, whether they like it or not, the capitalist rulers, by having to educate their slaves, thereby also create their own grave diggers.
So keep talking and above all trying to “engage” in true dialogue those whose opinions you find most at odds with your own, and especially the reactionary currents among “ourselves.”
“If it were to become a widespread “cultural” state of mind, what could the ruling establishment really do about it?”
Well, “Free Speech” (the virtual edition) has become exactly that; so the “what could they do about it?” is really the question “what have they done?”
They knew they didn’t have to burn books or forbid certain words (those aren’t the best ways to do it); all they had to do was generate millions of hours of Cultural Programming, for a few decades, to promote certain moods/attitudes and anathematize others and: voila: a quick check on Faceborg proves that certain statements will get you shouted down, shunned and “reported” immediately, no debate allowed. The perfect opposite of “Free Speech” and they didn’t have to pass much new legislation to make it happen; NeoLiberal Stasi-land is self-policing. There was a temporary glitch when “Conspiracy Theories” began to take on an aura of Higher Truth but they’ve sent in the Stasi-Land Cultural Fire Brigade Ninjas (armed with “Flat Earth” weapons and others) to fix that.
The problem with The Internet being that it was providing an education beyond The Education (aka Brainwashing)… they’re going to be working on rolling the Internet’s depth and breadth and reach way, way back, soon. They’ll two-tier it and pay wall it and ease in the Hate Speech Laws to tweak it away from its current dangerousness. They’ll give us more and better Porno in exchange! They’ll give us HD streaming (for superhero propaganda flicks) for FREE. All we have to do is relinquish the Radical Blogs. Deal? Deal.
“As Marx put it, whether they like it or not, the capitalist rulers, by having to educate their slaves, thereby also create their own grave diggers.”
Well, I’d contend that when “education” is actually just a modicum of technical training plus lots of Brainwashing, the capitalist rulers have nothing to fear from the grave diggers, who only ever bury Pharaohs who die at ripe old ages in their sleep… and that remark by Mr. Marx is a way of giving the slaves a false sense of agency. Because surely he must have known that grave-digging is a Serf’s hereditary occupation…? Laugh.
(I know, I know… we’ll forever disagree on Marxy, Norm! Well, at least I’m lovably foolish enough to admire Lennon, still…)
Too bleak! It’s not as polarised and absolute as that. Look at how mainstream narratives struggle to get across now. Look at the fracture between ATL and BTL in most neoliberal online publications.
Yes the dumbest masses are easily managed now, but they always have been. Looking at the current situation seems to suggest something we didn’t previously guess. That brainwashing the dumbest masses isn’t the goal. It’s the smaller groups of less dumb people that the elites are trying so hard to reach/convince. And they are significantly failing.
Why do the elites care about this relatively small number? I don’t know, but they obviously do, and are prepared to turn things upside down just to persuade or censor them. I suggest we don’t give in to the second tier of propaganda and believe ourselves less empowered than we really are.
You don’t think our situation is bleak? Not impossible… but… shading towards bleak, I should think, for sure. I think we should assess our status frankly.
“Why do the elites care about this relatively small number? I don’t know, but they obviously do, and are prepared to turn things upside down just to persuade or censor them. I suggest we don’t give in to the second tier of propaganda and believe ourselves less empowered than we really are.”
I would think that it’s the ongoing task of the lower end of the control apparatus to police dissent wherever it crops up. But just because we need to be crushed or persuaded doesn’t mean that we should congratulate ourselves, now, that we have more power (in our specific numbers, which are not vast) than we thought we already did. We need, first of all, to learn to be brutally clear-eyed and clear-minded about the situation, I feel.
The situation, as I see it, is that the biggest news of 2016 was that a Vulgarian 1%-er beat a Psychopathic War Criminal into the White House; that’s not exactly glorious stuff. Neither character represents us or our POVs and we learned, also, I should think, that neither do Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein. In other words, we didn’t even have a horse in the running, therefore, we couldn’t possibly have won. Though many of us seemed to think we did.
What we’re doing now is trying to hold on to a platform… a corner of the Internet… in which we can assemble, virtually, and share radical POVS in an attempt to lay down some kind of framework for possible change later. If this platform were taken away today (or next week; easily done): what would we do?
My feeling is that we of the Non-Psychopathic, Dissident “Left”… we who aren’t greedy bastards who need to monopolize the planet’s resources in order to invest in literal pyramid schemes to boost some evil sense of “status” and “manifest destiny”… we’ve been lulled into a series of telescoping dreams. Those dreams in which you wake up from one (thinking you’re awake) into another.
My feeling is that we must first endure the painful process of Identifying our Delusions so we can emerge from the cocoons of these Delusions’ distorting effects. Only then can we work on some long-range plans for actual action of some sort. The first action being some form of uninfiltrated Unity/ Organization in Meatspace. Real people in real groups capable of communicating, gathering, acting. Isn’t this a First Step?
Because, while the Smartest among US are, essentially, talking and/or making gestures… even many of the Dumbest among Them are putting shitty, destructive, insane plans into Action. One of our cherished Delusions, I think, is that there’s a symmetry to The Struggle between Left and Right. A division between two opposing forces. But that isn’t accurate, in my opinion. The struggle we have been witness to, since before we were all born, is the conflict between various factions of The Right. The Left has been, largely, a Concept; when it coalesced into a group, here and there, for exerting Actions, it was largely (through infiltration and co-optation) reduced to being a Nuisance and then a Spectator. So many of those “Revolutions” were Renovations. But we tell ourselves stories to the contrary. Stories that help us Dream.
How do we get into the Arena? How do we get on The Board… the Playing Field? How do we ACT?
Not by Dreaming. Not with all of our hopeful poetry about “empowerment”. Nothing is but what is not, in this system, and what they’ve let us think of as “empowerment”… this “positivity” business… is the opposite. I prefer to be clear-eyed, clear-minded. I want to know how bad things are so we can know what to change, how to change.
There are glimmers, obviously! Little sparks in the dark. Is Iceland a hopeful example? If so, why shouldn’t we dwell on it? Pick it apart for every detail. The clues in that case could be valuable… which could be why Iceland isn’t mentioned much…?
The situation is depressing. But it is not forgone. It is not forgone because history, that is to say, the eternal process of change, cannot be stopped.
Reality is a composite of interacting systems, some small, some large, but they all influence each other.
Think of the climate about which we have been talking about. Tiny but sustained variations can over time lead to huge changes that then stabilize into entire geological epochs.
It is the same with human formations. But with this difference: although social processes are “mostly” unconscious, they aren’t completely so.
Some people, some groups of people, as small as they maybe, sometimes rise to an awareness of things as they in some respects “stand,” and from this understanding, see a direction in which conditions could really be changed so as to be better permit the realizations of their conscious intentions and desires.
Capitalism in Europe didn’t always exist. And in part, it’s true, unconscious socioeconomic processes did create the social currents that eventually mutated into revolutions that were lead by small but privileged rebellious segments of the feudal order.
However, the bourgeoisie really did consciously enter into struggle against the entrenched ruling establishment of the times so as to seize political power, and though no outcome was ever foreordained by their struggle, persistence born of a high cultural achievement, that is to say, from a level of “education” attained, availed it of the levers which eventually, over a period of roughly 300 years, finally complete the work of toppling the ancient regimes.
Things started small, but eventually, incrementally, a coincidence of destabilizing factors did come together to create conditions that buried one regime and birthed an entirely new and in many ways more “progressive” civilization,
Not that it wasn’t in itself and in absolute terms morally revolting, just as it continues to be in this day, with its affinity for genocidal war and merciless exploitation. But it did “socialize” labor, that is to say, create fantastically efficient means of collaborative production, but above all, conditions that raised and continue to raise the overall cultural level (i.e., general awareness) of the masses.
Potentially, these two things — highly efficient socialized means of production and higher levels of cultural achievement for the masses — which exist today, are really the promise of unheard of material bounty for humanity (not in narrow consumerist terms, but in cultural and basic economic terms., If they can eventually be turned to account, if they can eventually be pried loose from the fetter of “for profit production,” they will be the progressive elements in Capitalism carried forward into a better future for all. And it can happen, because people already have begun to recognize the liberating potential inherent to those two things as at least one potential and realistic way forward.
But what needs to happen is for that awareness to become more general or widespread among the population, but especially among the most educated layers of the working class, which includes anyone who has to work for a living, no matter how sumptuous their remuneration may be in relative terms, because in periods of social upheavals, these individuals, the most educated among us, the most aware, these men and women are always the ones to lead their equals forward.
This is how Capital overturned feudalism, and it can also become the triumph of something more progressive than we have now, I say “more progressive,” not perfect, but substantively more ethical and humane.
Education matters. Because it potentially translates into “awareness,” and “awareness” is all that can potentially ever carry humanity forward, in contrast to blind ignorance, which is our sentence to our current collective slavery.
Norman, “education” is not a precise term. As far as I can tell, the “education” that the vast majority receives is a bundle of half-truths, obfuscations and deliberate lies… mixed in with enough technical information, in some cases, that an educated Serf is able to run and service the machines properly. I started educating myself after my official education ended, and it was a long process, 25 years of hit-and-miss, blind alleys, and pseudo-eye-opening moments that led, eventually, to what I felt were genuine epiphanies. I think you’re being remarkably optimistic about “education” when discussing the Serfs (us) who live outside of the castle.
Also: the bourgeoisie are not famous for their ability to use weapons. But the Bankers/ Industrialists certainly had the wherewithal to buy the politicians and finance guerrilla mercenaries to depose the old bloodlines. Don’t fall for the romances they try to sell us, Norm. If you want to know how it happened in the 18th century, take a good look at how it’s done now. There are technical differences, of course, but the mechanisms are remarkably similar. Both Then and Now, it’s a question of following the money. If you want to know who engineered a given “Revolution”, you’ll need to know who paid for it…. and who pays for the propaganda that’s always spread as “History” afterwards.
“Norman, “education” is not a precise term. As far as I can tell, the “education” that the vast majority receives is a bundle of half-truths, obfuscations and deliberate lies… mixed in with enough technical information, in some cases, that an educated Serf is able to run and service the machines properly.”
Education is literacy. Literacy is the ability to read and to “potentially” reflect. Implicit in “grammar” and “syntax” is the seed of “logical, and therefore, critical thinking.” The people in control of education may not want to inculcate ‘philosophical insight,’ but the ground of ‘philosophical insight’ is literacy, grammar and syntax, and this is being provided aplenty to the serfs, and here and there the inevitable awakening is happening, not matter how much the those who control the curriculum exert themselves to confound those they “educate.” Furthermore, “thinking” is what humans “can” do. It’s a natural impulse. The more of it a person does, the more adept he or she becomes. A person can always be incited to reflect. Incite those you know to ‘think.’ Encourage. Be kind in your encouragement. Just because a person has been miseducated and appear to be dumb, it doesn’t mean that they are dumb, but maybe only because they have been denied mentoring and opportunity. Create small opportunities.
“I started educating myself after my official education ended, and it was a long process, 25 years of hit-and-miss, blind alleys, and pseudo-eye-opening moments that led, eventually, to what I felt were genuine epiphanies.”
I didn’t start to read and write until I was in my early twenties, in the 1980s. So, very personally, I know that merely learning to read and write can take a person to interesting places . . .
“Also: the bourgeoisie are not famous for their ability to use weapons. But the Bankers/ Industrialists certainly had the wherewithal to buy the politicians and finance guerrilla mercenaries to depose the old bloodlines. “
In a context where money buys mercenaries, that is in part how “revolutions” happen. Do you think I am oblivious to this reality? That I don’t grasp the power of “money” in a context in which “money” is the sin qua non of “power?” That I don’t “get” the mechanics of co-optation and, so to speak, its analogue in “color revolutions?”
This is the element, I think, that is missing in your analysis or that doesn’t get sufficient emphasis: the capitalist economy is prone to “systemic crises,” that is, to critical failures in the networks of the production and distribution of goods and services which result in “real,” not “contrived,” moments of political instability that no one, not even the omnipotent power of money, can control or forestall.
Merely to save myself some time, a quote from something I wrote:
When the system begins to break down, when large numbers of people begin to suffer acutely from not having their basic needs and expectations satisfied in customary ways, the end of [a period of social and political stability potentially draws nigh], people begin to be shaken out of their ideological trances, to wonder about what the fuck is going on. They notice that between the promises being preached by the elect from on high and the paltriness of the miracles being realized on the ground, there is a painful discrepancy if not a chasm.
When the people begin to suffer en mass and the suffering becomes sufficiently intolerable, that is the time of possible mass upheavals, and there is no telling how turbulent the coming storm might be or what it may leave in its aftermath.
The aftermath will certainly be a new order, a new [period of stability] dominated by reconfigured ideologies, the mindset or culture of whoever will then comprise the new ruling class. This mindset will most certainly and in many ways resemble the dominant mindset(s) of what went before: it will be reactionary or progressive on the basis of what was because nothing in the evolution of culture or modes of life ever emerges into the light of day that isn’t largely a variation of what went before.
Therefore, the likelihood of a socialist aftermath will depend upon how far and wide the ideals of socialism will have been disseminated before the upheaval happens. You cannot make a revolution; but a revolution can to some degree be co-opted. That is the most that progressives can hope for.
Money isn’t the only or final determinant of revolutions. Hunger and misery backed up by realistic aspirations can also come to dominate the upsurges of popular rebellions.
I’ll end this with a quote from Daniel Guerin:
But, though class instinct impels them to break their chains, the masses of the people lack education and consciousness. And as they surge with redoubtable energy, but clumsily and blindly, towards freedom, bumping into privileged, astute, expert, organized and experienced social classes, they can only triumph over the resistance they encounter if they successfully acquire, in the heat of battle, the consciousness, expertise, organization and experience in which they are deficient. But the very act of forging the weapons just listed, which are the only ones that can ensure that they get the better of their adversary, carries with it an enormous danger: that it might kill the spontaneity which is the heart of the revolution, that it might compromise freedom inside the organization, or allow the movement to be taken over by a minority elite of more expert, more aware, more experienced militants who, to start with put themselves forward as guides, only to end up imposing themselves as leaders and subjecting the masses to some new form of man’s exploitation of his fellow men.
“When the people begin to suffer en mass and the suffering becomes sufficiently intolerable, that is the time of possible mass upheavals, and there is no telling how turbulent the coming storm might be or what it may leave in its aftermath.”
Norm, how long would you reckon suffering has been intolerable in the “Black Community” in North America…? Isn’t the trick, of keeping the whole thing running, in letting conditions get a lot less tolerable for some than others?
Re: Literacy: wouldn’t you consider most of HRC’s (and BHO’s) fans literate? What special good does literacy do them if the texts are used to deliver propaganda? I’m not saying being able to read isn’t good, I’m just saying that “education” is not, in and of itself, a path to enlightenment. If you’re raised in a field of powerful propaganda, “education” means what?
” the capitalist economy is prone to “systemic crises,” that is, to critical failures in the networks of the production and distribution of goods and services which result in “real,” not “contrived,” moments of political instability that no one, not even the omnipotent power of money, can control or forestall.”
Whether or not this is true, this doesn’t modify my observation that all of the “revolutions” we know and/or celebrate cost lots of money. Money from where? From whom? Not peasants. Not the bourgeoisie. Bankers.
Only someone deeply in the grips of the capitalist mindset could not imagine how anything, including revolution, could ever happen without “money.”
And only someone who imagines that “indoctrination” can be perfect and render people uneducable can believe that once people achieve a certain degree of literacy, they somehow become beyond the reach of reason.
“Isn’t the trick, of keeping the whole thing running, in letting conditions get a lot less tolerable for some than others?”
Do you understand “the trick?” Do you “get” the “trick?” If you “get” the “trick,” what makes you think that it’s impossible for others, too, to “get” the “trick?” Shouldn’t you endeavor, you who “get” the “trick,” to help others understand what you think you understand?
And if you’ve tried but failed, maybe you need to re-think your pedagogical strategy, no?
Maybe you are too aggressive. Maybe you come on too strong. Maybe you don’t settle for trying to help those you would disabuse of their illusions for something a bit less ambitious than having them grasp the “whole picture” all at once, like maybe only planting one “seed” of doubt about an obvious piece of “incoherence” in their thinking.
Just because you aren’t having much apparent success, doesn’t mean you are actually coming at this the right way.
On the other, maybe you are coming at this in just the right way, but the effects you are having on others won’t become apparent for quite some time and maybe not even in your own lifetime.
Small changes that happen are small changes, after all.
They are incremental by definition.
But they can accumulate to eventually become avalanches.
So you have a choice: you can see defeat in everything around you or you can apprehend the “fact” of the small but real progressive effects that anyone can have in this world and make a conscious effort to join in with the necessary work of nudging things along in the direction in which you would want them to go because you can see that they can quite “realistically” end up going in that direction and, anyway, you because in the end you have “reality” and “truth” on your side.
Just because you are not seeing immediate and dramatic results doesn’t mean you are helping to incubate the conditions that will eventually erupt in precisely the dramatic ways in which you would hope them to happen. And “everything” isn’t achieved in just one such “eruption,” but in a long series of such eruptions. Capital was not born and finally established in one day or after only a single decisive battle.
You sound defeated. Sometimes I am, too. But mostly I am not. Because I think I do have a grasp on how “social change” happens and understand that it can be to some degree made to align with human intention, mine being that of the majority, hoping for something more along the lines of kindness and dignity for all.
Question: When the American establishment decided to extirpate the Indians in the 19th Century, did the Indian warriors who “organized” en masse to put up resistance do so only for “money.” Was money their only means of availing themselves of the provisions and materials they needed to engage with the force of arms they could muster?
Question: what happened in Detroit in 1967? Was that momentary disturbance staged? Did those who rioted do it for “money?”
Re-read the bit from Daniel Guerin. Dedicate a moment or two of thinking to what he says. Nothing is certain to come to pass. But what is even more certain is that no intention can be realized unless someone puts in an effort.
Samir Amin on the process of social change and other things (it’s four parts, which should all automatically cue up and follow into each other):
As exercises in futility go, this has certainly been a fun one. But, re:
“Question: When the American establishment decided to extirpate the Indians in the 19th Century, did the Indian warriors who “organized” en masse to put up resistance do so only for “money.” Was money their only means of availing themselves of the provisions and materials they needed to engage with the force of arms they could muster?
Question: what happened in Detroit in 1967? Was that momentary disturbance staged? Did those who rioted do it for “money?”
1) That’s just it: we’re not talking about Aboriginal Americans.
2) If you want to do the research, Norm, even the mainstream sources offer (profoundly low-balled) estimates for the material costs of the various “Revolutions” under discussion. For example, the bit about the gunpowder supplied to the insurgents of America’s Revolutionary War: they were severely lacking in gunpowder; no gunpowder, no revolution.
3) Detroit 1967: you mean when a disorganized, underfunded mass of marginalized people fucked up their own neighborhoods? Dozens of those happen, at various scales, every decade, Norm. They not only don’t put a dent in Capitalism, they add to the health of The System by keeping the Serfs polarized and the Electorate frightened.
Before replying, did you a) muse for more than half of one second over the bit from Guerin? b) take the time to listen to the interview with Amin.
If you did, it was done in record time. So the futility of which you speak seems to me to stem from an obvious refusal on your part.
You didn’t parse much of the content of my reply, but you have a ready answer to counter it. How does that work, exactly?
Norm, chill. I’m watching the vid now. I responded to the bits I could respond to immediately; I do the extra reading or watching at my leisure. I can respond piecemeal if I choose to, no…?
Yes, of course. BTW: I have to attend to other business for the next while, so replies may be slow coming. Take your time. I also want to think about what you wrote a bit more deeply.
My french and poor typing and editing skills are getting in the way today. I meant to write:
“Just because you are not seeing immediate and dramatic results doesn’t mean you aren’t helping to incubate the conditions that will eventually erupt in precisely the dramatic ways in which you would hope them to happen.
Anyway, I’m not saying I have The Answers… I’m saying that all the Old Hypothetical Answers won’t work. I’m saying: the only way to think up some Fresh New (Possibly Functional) Answers is to shake off the old dreams, the old romances, the old heroes, especially. I’m saying we were given those dreams and heroes to keep us exactly where we are.
“Why do the elites care about this relatively small number? …”
The Powers That Be are following traditional marketing strategy of targeting small groups of people perceived to be so-called opinion leaders. In marketing, opinion leaders represent the forefront of change or acceptance; marketing studies done in the past showed such people to be influential within their social groups.
People studying marketing and advertising learn about a concept called the Product Life Cycle which is based on patterns of consumer acceptance of new products, services or trends. The critical part of this life cycle for marketing PR is to pinpoint likely opinion leaders who will spread news about the item to lay the groundwork for general public acceptance. The PTB are applying something similar in pushing the propaganda but in a blunt way.
Not so – you can act and accept the consequence.
Or you may find you simply cannot and will not for your own reasons – and the consequence is a cover story for not being who you are – or even for being true to who you are and finding no support within yourself to venture at this timing in this circumstance.
If you want someone or something Else to give you freedom – you’ve missed something.
While I don’t hide behind it – the Christian idea of true witness was associated in part with the experience of persecution or of not being received or understood. This is just describing the territory of being truly moved – amidst a rule-bound society where movement of true will is ruled out. (Note I did not say ruled out from).
I invite people to check in, listen or feel within themselves – before speaking and ongoing within relationship – because the mind is a device of forgetting or missing what is really here – while under the impression it knows.
If you live on purpose – you know and own your purpose – but if you run on default reactions you may say and do in ways that are destructive, inflammatory or divisive while feeling ‘right’ at the time.
I wonder if looking more deeply at the un-freedoms within you – will not reveal the freedom expressing itself in limitation – that you can then review as a choice. If you move and get hit, move and get hit, move and get hit, you learn not to move. So finding the trust of the will to move is different from asserting a sense of rage at being denied as your witness.
Well, to the extent that Free Speech means actually saying whatever we may choose to, without facing punishment for the mere fact of saying it”, we don’t have Free Speech. Free Speech in one’s own mind, or at home, in the safety of one’s own kitchen, is meaningless… the Virtual Free Speech we’ve been gulled into “defending” while we abdicated the Right to *actual Free Speech a long time ago (with being “good” the excuse).
(not sure why the italics function went nuts there! Ooops! laugh)
If you feel a driven reaction to speak that is not representative of who you accept yourself to be – then you are free to withhold it. If you act or fail to act in self-betrayal then that result is a consequence of your act through which you grow in alignment.
I feel a willingness to listen – this is both within myself and to you or to my experience of the world. Truly there is one thing going on but to the mind it seems many.
I choose and feel a freedom in discerning and embodying the movement I feel resonant with – such as joining with you in this theme now.
The idea of freedom of speech as a cultural or political right is the shared idea of the value of communication – of relationship and taking or being taken into account.
But as well as the taboos that operate largely inductively or via example (such as a doctor being wakefielded), we have our own intuitive sense of when, whether and how much. Life – relationship – is a dance in which we are revealed as we feel free to be. People may transact to generate conditions of temporary or conditional permissions for more expression within such conditions – and feel confined in the larger society or with different situations – even with the same people.
The imposition of correctnesses – regardless their cultural history – is the overt dictate of thoughts expressed publicly on specific issues rather than under the law that would come into being against incitement to violence. Hate – as branded – is being made a criminal ‘sin’ and to break the rule and speak out opinion that is not correctly phrased becomes a ‘legitimised’ target for hate that deems itself righteous. With some agenda even to criticize at all – will bring the forceful charge of anti-something – as an invalidation from which perhaps to escape with self-humiliation – or be branded henceforth and perhaps called to resign, stigmatized and un-friended.
When the innocence of a child shouted “why is the Emperor naked?” it is the innocence that communicates a truth no agenda could speak and BE heard. If you would be free of fear, hate and fear of invalidation so as to see without self-concern, live that freedom whenever you have the opportunity to. But I feel it would be foolish to assume you have the power to free others of what you haven’t really addressed in yourself.
Part of the device is to provoke reaction by running against existing conditioning. When deceits bait and phish for reaction, all your liabilities are pointed out to you by your reaction. When symptoms of dis-ease press upon you – might they be messengers beneath the initial reaction of attempts to eradicate, block or control?
Are we free to listen and truly learn – or running the freedom to shut our mind to anything we don’t want to hear? Is freedom of thought so easy – as you suggest or is that room to indulge the ego?
What don’t you feel free to know and grow in? If you would force an outcome are you not contradicting your own professed values?
“If you feel a driven reaction to speak that is not representative of who you accept yourself to be – then you are free to withhold it.”
Binra, I agree with a not negligible amount of what you often have to say, but there are times when the gnomic and the Delphic, no matter how profound seeming, become fortune-cookie filler.
You are demonstrating your freedom to accept what resonates in you and ignore what doesn’t. If you feel the need to invalidate what you don’t prefer, then that’s your choice too – but you can just leave what you don’t want on the plate. You don’t have to diss on what you don’t prefer in order to justify leaving it.
You also illuminate that no matter what someone feels free to speak, others are no less free to hear as their own minds determine. So freedom of speech is no guarantee anyone is listening to anything but their own message.
If you believe you are not free – then you choose to limit yourself and blame someone or something else for it. If you choose not to validate the belief – you leave your consciousness open to discovering the nature of freedom in a more profound appreciation than thinking about it. If you had none you could not recognize it at all. What you appreciate, appreciates and a negative appreciation grows a sense of deprivation and lack.
if we are already invested and identified in specific self-definitional patterns – we are conformed within our own belief while such ideas investments are actively held. We each make choices and have to live their results – until replaced by new choices.
“If you believe you are not free – then you choose to limit yourself and blame someone or something else for it. If you choose not to validate the belief – you leave your consciousness open to discovering the nature of freedom in a more profound appreciation than thinking about it.”
Binra, that’s not only silly, but it’s a shopworn sophistry recycled from the heyday of such sophistries, when eye-catching, Oh Wow paperbacks of the early 1970s cluttered the Earth. Yes, and a man in prison is “free” to the extent that he never strains against the bars of his tiny cell; he’s free to fantasize when not doing exactly what the guards tell him to do. This is breakthrough stuff. You should write a pseudo-philosophical bestseller called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest! That would be just the thing.
“What you appreciate, appreciates and a negative appreciation grows a sense of deprivation and lack.”
That’s the cover blurb. I’m thinking: an embossed silver Ankh on the purple cover. Or a Ying/Yang symbol, perhaps. An Om?
You merely repeat your judgement of me as if demonstrating your superiority.
As you choose to invest in such – so must you defend your investment.
But is it not your CHOICE as to where to invest your energy and attention? Regardless the thinking by which you believe it meaningful to do so.
If you assign ‘freedom’ to power OVER life – then that is the power you have the glory of being subjected to.
Who values freedom – will give as they would receive – for otherwise they cannot have it. This is the core of honouring freedom in each other as a basis of relationship and communication.
To assign freedom at the level of body is to suffer a life of driven compulsions and passing gratifications.
The enacting of fantasy gratifications upon the body under false associations is ‘using people’ or relationships as merely something to get from. There is no freedom in such self-evasion.
Yet the body can be embraced in gratitude and appreciation for being, replacing the drive to gratify a poor sense of self at expense of others, with new eyes to see.
Binra, please stop generating kilometers of nonsense. Thanks.
Repeating yourself in terms of derogatory personal assertions – as if your are not free to choose what to engage with but have to ‘suffer’ the ‘offence’ of a my freedom to share views that do not require you or anyone else to be vilified or laughed at – in order to seem to be something.
If there are issues you want to address – do so. If you don’t want to then dont. But to crap on something as you shut the door and point at the crap – is exactly the kind of behaviour you SAY that you don’t like in the ‘elites’.
Of course you can imagine scenarios where YOU cannot believe any freedom can be found. Such is torture, terror and the threat of terror. But it may be because you are not growing freedom where it truly is – but live under the illusion you have it? Or have to ‘get it back’ from those who provide excuse for not living what you have. You offer yourself as an example – but nothing I say is exclusive to you.
The human conditioning is complex and profound – and cant be meaningfully addressed or resolved by good v evil – or superior v subhuman narrative devices.
indeed I see the resort to such personal attack as a revealing that at least part of you does not WANT perspective to open – but only YOUR perspective to prevail. My sense of the power that we believe we suffer under, is of something focused in ‘Them’ – but fed by subjection to fear-defined reality. One can say that such a mass of largely unconscious fear, is tapped into – like a botnet – to maintain the darkness in which fresh information or perspective is denied – except as it can be weaponized, or marketized.
If you give the measure – to what I am willing to seek articulation of – then that is YOUR measure of YOUR worth.
I know you are worthy of infinitely more than derision – but I cannot and would not interfere with your freedom to learn through your own choices. There is a freedom to BE more truly aligned and aware in what you are – as compared to what you have come to believe or fear yourself to be. What you DO always embodies who you accept yourself to BE. So while there are nuances of the timing, the form and the manner of actions taken – the core freedom is of your true being – instead of spinning the mind off into nightmares and attempts to escape or deny terror symbols.
Would you like freedom to act without consequence? Freedom from self-responsibility and the power to outsource all the crap onto everyone ELSE?
Any notion of freedom that is not relational freedom – that is lived within relational awareness – is blind appetite or conditioning. Only the recognition OF this opens freedom FROM it. Not ‘thinking about it’. That takes all the time you give it to think some more…
That is what thinking identifies as life and protects against exposure – for it is causeless – or without basis in truth.
The attempt to expose this in ANOTHER is an attack on their freedom and your own – but the willingness to heal our part in this – in ourself – means we grow a capacity to demonstrate an example from which others are free to pick up on.
You may say you have nothing in common with those you blame for the state of the world – but I am not talking blame – but true self-responsibility or ‘freedom’. You can choose to be a victim – or you can let that choice go un-fed – in a willingness to regain true presence. To incarnate or live the live you are here to unfold and share in whatever that may look like to those who feel challenged by contrast.
I thankyou for co-creating this with me – and for the points illuminated. You may not be aware of this – but you have my gratitude none the less.
Binra, I characterized specific texts among your texts, not you.
Oh – which were they ? Only the long ones? You are free to make clear your communication if you choose. But while you may hide behind ‘plausible deniability’ – your insinuated intent and meaning by was very clear.
However, no offence taken as you obviously got the wrong end of the stick. Have a good day!
“If there are issues you want to address – do so. If you don’t want to then dont. But to crap on something as you shut the door and point at the crap – is exactly the kind of behaviour you SAY that you don’t like in the ‘elites’.”
A) I tend to express myself pretty directly, Binra. I referred to a couple of your recent responses to me as “nonsense”. That was precisely the issue I meant to address.
B) Nowhere have I accused “elites” of letting their collective patience run thin with my less-clear-minded screeds. I’m not “crapping” on you, I’m telling you that I don’t like reading extremely long texts that don’t, in the end, say very much.
A few days ago you responded to a joke Norm made about Bill Gates. The language you used was clear; I thought it was good.
One man’s failure to meet is another man’s passion.
So you had expectations of me that I failed to live up to!
I’ll see what I can do about making you read what you don’t find meaningful.
OK – just don’t give it a second thought.
While dense – what I write is of felt meanings – that resonate in me as an articulation of something tangible – and relevant to the themes being raised.
Believers or deniers is the same expressed within mutually reinforcing polarities.
True believing has no need to assert – for one simply lives from what is stood in with both feet.
True denial doesn’t even react to what isn’t at all acknowledged.
I have NO doubt as to the ‘territory’ of existence – being a definite example – but when I meet what doesn’t at first make sense, I sense into it without forcing my mind onto it – and become free to notice more.
Everyone lives according to what they believe or accept true – as a result of how they define themselves in relation to their world. But we can awaken in freedom to evaluate such beliefs and change them. Therein lies our release from fear and war-minded subjection. Many find this as they approach dying – one doesn’t have to be clever so much as be brought to the point. I don’t feel we rage at death – but at life – as failed expectations.
This is becoming both a bit too personal and slightly repetitive, no?
Not to mention jaw-droppingly inconsequential. But if you’d care to do a word-count comparison, in this dialogue between Binra and I, you’ll see that I have a few hundreds words of credit remaining.
So, what were we discussing, anyway? Ah, yes….
QED
Laugh
Make every word count, and there is nothing inconsequential whatsoever. Even the seemingly trivial can yield new perspectives. Education is the willingness of learning – and the demonstration of teach what you have learned. We all ‘are this’ – all the time – but not necessarily in a clearly directed focus. Especially when we think we already know – and I don’t direct that at you – but include us all. In the theme of believers and deniers – we so easily are triggered against what we think we see in the other – and can then act in ways that invoke polarized ‘exchange’ if not dialogue.
Freedom of speech is a matter of trust – for who speaks the truth of their heart to that which cannot or doesn’t see them – or listen? No we present something else. There are various aspects to freedom of relating and communicating – but the culture being established and maintained is perhaps the most critical. Blame and guilt kill the spirit of trust. But examining blame and guilt feelings opens the way to release them. Is there another way of seeing? Is there a basis upon which Life on Earth can truly flourish? Same thing – differently put. IMO.
In the spirit of the stated intent of this article it would merit refraining from personal invalidations and accusations – in a longhand willingness to illuminate the issue rather than resort to in-house mythological shorthand.
I expect the strategy behind the climate for primates agenda to be subtle in its operation – so as to seem to give victories of no consequence while installing legal and corporate structures that de-facto embody the change regardless the red rag of the media to the bull.
As with the corporatisation and regulatory capture of ‘medical science’ by Rockefeller/Carnegie et al, the few who know what is happening find no voice and no funding to match the immense resources of the will to possess, or control both wealth and knowledge. The new world order is not for the older who see the ruse, for they die off while the young grow within the conditionings of a framed and directed identity.
I hold that the ‘world’ such ‘order’ generates is not only fulfilling of its motive desire – but destructive to life on Earth – as the pinnacle of an unrecognized insanity, or dissociated displacement – mutually reinforced in fear of loss.
Uncovering even a spark of truly shared sanity remains the basis of ‘Ariadne’s thread’ and the retracing from and free relinquishing of a now recognized insanity. For without the spark of a truly connected perspective there is no truth but war establishes – however cunningly waged and however forcefully justified.
So the willingness to intuit the willingness in others – is key – as a discipline to replace the shorthand reactions of what seems to be going on because it shares appearance and association with a past condition.
There is no one to communicate with except others of different perspectives – and while bubble realities can serve as conditions for relationships and ideas to develop – the whole calls forth the willingness and capacity to communicate or share into the whole rather than retreat into elitism – for self-specialness withholds and defends against loss of specialness – when beneath such confusions are unique gifts and perspectives within the richness and diversity of the whole.
The flowering of Our Spirit shines in cross fertilisations of ideas and inspirations and the freedom to ‘fight’ our differences honourably because we have a passion of life in what moves us – and not a fear of being shut down and closed off in our creative connection. For acting from such fear is what actually closes off and shuts down. So to David – hard feelings can be allowed to trigger loss of voice. But that is your power – not Catte’s.
I notice that our minds are trained to seek validation and agreement – and also to invalidate another so as to ‘steal’ their power or ‘get our own, back’. I learned most of this in school playgrounds as ‘survival skills’.
I believe that if we are to grow a renewal of culture from the wreckage of the hollowed out, it will be the willingness to re-learn communication as an extension of worth – that we are at least in a moment of willingness of receiving ourselves. The moment we assign worthlessness to another being – we share something else – but each in separate polarised identity. When I receive invitations to share in worthlessness – I have a choice as to whether to accept that as myself. But once in reaction – the judgement operates as self-evident ‘reality’.
When I first consciously learned anything new, I made mistakes all along – and yet that is how I learned – by incorporating unexpected results as feedback `FOR’ learning – and not as a narrative abut me. I believe that just where the territory seems to break off communication, is where the richest insight opens. Ultimately I see this as a matter of whether another OR myself is worth it – worthy of hanging in with as a resonance and relevance to who I truly am and prefer to be. The value we place on truth is the measure of our receiving.
“I expect the strategy behind the climate for primates agenda to be subtle in its operation – so as to seem to give victories of no consequence while installing legal and corporate structures that de-facto embody the change regardless the red rag of the media to the bull.”
The push is toward a renovated Control Structure, yes. Whereas they normally use “terrorists” to herd the populace toward the desired chutes, with AGW they use “global extinction” as the motivator… which is both bigger than “terrorists” but more abstract, less visceral. It’s taking longer to really “take”. Meanwhile, since They control “information”, they can keep ramping the scare tactics (alarming new reports of polar bears with skin cancer? Baby penguins baking alive in the heat?) and use current technology to goose the weather, here and there (chemtrails…?) to heighten minor, temporary (but narratively significant) anomalies. Eg:
A few years ago, BHO was scheduled to speak in Berlin. It had been a totally cold and dreary, very rainy season. The day BHO spoke (at the Brandenburg gate? Can’t remember; obviously, I didn’t attend) it was, “miraculously”, cloudless and beautiful. Soon thereafter the rainy season resumed. Anecdotal, sure. Still…
“The new world order is not for the older who see the ruse, for they die off while the young grow within the conditionings of a framed and directed identity.”
Corollary observation: decoupling the “Elders” from the “Youth” (ie pre-decapitating the potentially Radicalized-and- Effective Populace) has been an obvious goal since the mid-20th century. The Elders are anathematized; “Youth Culture” is now Total… whoever or whatever can’t be Juvenalized must be discarded/ avoided/ ridiculous. The Serfs are just a Young (vital/ gullible) Body without its older, wiser, experienced Head.
Relentless Neomania, in trivial consumer tech goods and services, meant to keep Elders out of the loop (while accelerating the profit cycle)? Every time I look up there’s a new protocol to master on a platform that will be obsolete in 6 months. September/June relationships mocked in Media. Cultural Activities in which Elders formerly dominated (Studio Arts/ Literature/ Film Directing/ Record Production, et al) flooded with mediocre Youth (Youth as a cultural virtue in itself). Literature (former stronghold of Elders and Elder Knowledge) Juvenalized/ trivialized in the direction of Twitter….?
I still hold that we meet our reflection, individual and collective.
In another thread here genes and environment came up.
The ability to define reality (distort our experience of it to serve our own thought) set up the need to adjust to such reality experience. Thus we are conditioned by our self-imposed but unconscious conditioning.
So up to a point, one can say ‘they’ have the power to make all these things operate or serve their agenda – and up to a point one can say that believing that gives power to such a narrative and in acting as if true – reinforces it and is conditioned by it.
The mindset that most everyone loves to hate… in others, is not so hard to find in oneself.
This page could be seen as an experiment as to opening the possibility of dialogue without polarising to the point of breakdown of communication.
Just as a result of imagining a different accounting – say that Higgs-Boson is in fact a particle/wave/field from which all else of a resonant factor acquires mass. Then consider that the GETTING principle is also a Field/wave in which a whole host of particulars otherwise not necessarily related operate in concert and at times align in insider ‘conspiracy’ against outsiders. I simply see this as a negative self-interest – where negative is segregative and divisive and separating – as a sense of self-salvation from a fear of loss of self in unified, inclusive and integrating purpose. So a fear-driven mind meets a fear-driven world and cannot see what its mind doesn’t allow to be seen – and therefore cannot exist of have any meaning.
We have – despite attempts to limit and distort it – a science in which much that was unseen is brought to awareness – that expands or changes the narrative reality. So for all things we have narrative or personified dramatic mythos – overlaid upon the relational events – that in all cases testify to and reinforce the mind that makes it – as the capacity to distort reality and believe the distortion true.
Paradoxically the assertion of such a reality-distortion operates the denial of the Consciousness upon which it depends. For who knows the ruse of an illusion can no longer simply believe it true – they have to pump it with something like QE – which is a more sanitised example of the sacrifice of the living to prop up the dead. But outrage does not address the identity IN concept-adjustment unless taken to heart – all the way home.
Alarm can mean attend or note an out of true condition, but inventing snooze devices can translate the dissonance into terms of the dream so that the alarm triggers fight of flight reaction – and a persistent alarm conditions a polarized and fearful fragmentation of thought, feeling and relation. The snooze device works because it is invented and employed to fulfil its purpose. But is it Your purpose Now, as you wake enough to see your own script?
A rather well reasoned article defending the paramount need for free speech. Bravo & thanks, Catte.
Also a most apt reference to the Inquisition: we are in a parallel situation.
The Roman Catholic church had become totally corrupt & instituted the Inquisition to preserve its command & control position of the Middle Ages.
It was a period of tortures, wars & wholesale deaths.
In the name of the Lord?
No, in the name of money & power..
The command & control position of our present paradigm is held by Big Money: the Banksters, the Multinationals, the Mega-rich individuals who own & control our mainstream media & politicians.
This paradigm is failing: more & more people have lost faith in our corrupt politicians, political institutions & media. Witness the birth of this website, the rise of Farage & Brexit.
The Big Hate is Big Money’s Inquisition, their attempt at shutting down free speech to preserve their command & control agenda.
Since I retired, I’ve read quite deeply into the Global Warming/Climate con, which I’m happy to denounce as the biggest science scam ever, but that’s for another thread.
The thing that’s not sustainable in our present paradigm is fiat money, backed by nothing, created out of thin air, as debt, by private banks masquerading as arms of govts, with said money then lent to govts, at interest, to the enslavement to debt of the populace who pay the interest. It’s called Fractional Reserve Banking/Lending & is the biggest financial scam ever & these are what Big Money is most anxious we do not discuss.
Yes, most certainly, free speech is of paramount importance for human progress, & our increasingly Nazi MSM & Govts are increasingly determined to squash it.
As for the Polish twit, whatever happened to just laughing at a fool?
Please do keep up the good work.
Best,
John Doran.
In the UK, more young women are leaving secondary education with university entrance qualifications than are young men. I believe a similar situation to this is taking place in the USA too.
In the UK, more young women are now entering on to degree-awarding courses than young men.
What does that say about relative levels of intelligence between young women and young men?
It may by now be the case that young women are exceeding young men as degree graduates too.
For all I know, this could the same situation in Poland too.
Maybe Mr Korwin-Mikke MEP feels threatened by all these bright young women?
He would not be the first.
Men are the people with the highest IQ according to the vast majority of available studies, and are 90 percent of people who earn more than 1 million per year (IQ and earnings are correlated), 95 percent of pilots, 90 percent of surgeons, 90 percent of nobel laureats, 98 percent of science nobel laureats, 95 percent of inventors, 80 percent of professors, 66 percent of MENSA members, 98 percent of Fields Medal medalists, and 98 percent of Turing Award recipients, as well as the vast majority of human geniuses. This is because smart men have more children that smart women. According to various studies, intelligence is having negative impact on female fertility and marriage prospects, but is having neutral to positive impact on male reproductive fitness and marriage prospects. The smarter the woman, the lower the fertility, which means that lack of intelligence increases reproductive fitness among women, tand nature does not need very intelligent women. Men have higher mean iQ and are more variable than women, which leads to a situation, where you have two men for every woman with IQ 120. Among people with IQ 170, you have one woman per 30 men.
Women don’t invent almost anything, even in the most feminist countries, such as Sweden, women are only 20 percent of professors and only 9 percent of inventors. Since women have extremely poor creativity, only 5-10 percent of the male creativity, and don’t invent almost anything, if left to themselves, women will be living in caves. Feminist Camille Paglia is a bit more generous; she thinks that if women are left to themselves, they will be living in grass huts.
So a smart man and a dumb woman tend to have smart boys and stupid girls? Don’t both genders share their parents’ genes somewhat randomly? I think your argument is that intelligence heritability is gender-related in the sense that the mother passes on intelligence genes to the girl and the father to the boy, but you’d have to verify that that’s what you’re saying. If not that, what are you saying about reproductive fitness and the lowering of female intelligence?
And why put so much store in only a very slim measure, culturally and possibly gender configured, of total human intelligence in any case? This is the measure that has brought the planet to the edge of destruction. How smart is that?
Hi D, not much free time, there are various conflicting studies about what parent is the primary source of intelligence genes, or whether there is primary source at all. Currently there is no consensus about this issue. I will just say that the source of intelligence genes does not matter that much, whether the mother or the father is the primary source, or they are both. What matters is if the boy/girl needs those genes, not only if the parent is smart. The boy will most likely receive more intelligence genes than the girl, even if both parents have equal IQ, or the mother have higher IQ. In the case of high IQ mother, the mother will (more often than not) pass more intelligence genes to the son, and restrict those genes from her daughter.
Sexual antagonism is a situation where one sex receives genes that are not received by the other sex. This happens if those same genes will help the first sex, but will have negative impact on the other sex.
In biology, this contradictory relation between intelligence and fertility would be described as a sexually antagonistic trait because it increases reproductive fitness of one sex (males) and decreases it in the other (females). As such, these genes are under conflicting selection pressures as they pass between genders over the course of multiple generations. This creates a large incentive to evolve sexually dimorphic expression patterns which can silence or diminish expression of intelligence genes in females while allowing the same genes to be turned on in males.
The second cause for intelligence differences between the sexes could be that high status people (and there is some correlation between high status people, earnings, and IQ) have more boys, while low status people have more girls (the Trivers-Willard effect).
Good night.
So, you, as a man, are probably smarter than Catte, the author of this article and a woman?
I have to say I’d be wary of that hypothesis if I were you.
Just one question, if you could indulge me: the “intelligence genes” you speak of, where in the human DNA sequence are they located, and are we talking something like a football team of genes, or something more analogous to a curling team?
Yes, that’s a compound question, I know. But if you only answer one, hey, that’ll be one answer to something I didn’t know about.
Into the ideas – if not the ‘argument’ :
I hold environment – as defined, and as defining, as the primary conditioning of what then grows – yet life is some capacity to re-evaluate our definitions and make some changes to our environment. Nearly all of our current ‘mind’ focuses exclusively in the latter.
I hold that the gene genie is epigenetically activated according to ‘environmental’ factors – including the nocebo effect – (belief in a negative outcome). But the wish to believe oneself escaped of self-transformational responsibility may assert ‘hard-wired reality’ as a kind of protectionism, regardless anything brought to communication.
That may be broadly identified as fear of change running an impossibility or futility of change or ‘non-negotiable reality’. If ‘studies were to prove’ that free will has no basis in life – I would be free to disregard it as part of my experience of existence – but that is because I am connected to my experience of existence – and not getting it through the narrative mentality of clever (or not) thinking.
“I hold environment – as defined, and as defining, as the primary conditioning of what then grow”
Yes.
“I hold that the gene genie is epigenetically activated according to ‘environmental’ factors”
There is no “gene genie.” There is no thing that is “intelligence.” This is a mystification. Even the “individual” is an illusion, although for sure there is that seemingly discrete creature which is imagined and imagines itself to be an “individual.” But you will notice that no human can truly subsist in isolation from others. “We” are more a collective “organism” than we are “separate beings.” We are both, never only one or the other, but sometimes more of one than the other, depending on the situation we are in.
That we are both AND More – is of an embracing Intelligence – at least I am aware of relationship and communication and assign these qualities to Life.
It doesn’t matter to me so much the symbols used as the intent.
Relationship is the Nature of the extension and reflection of Creation.
We love our ‘brother’ as ourself – which is to say – we don’t recognize and truly share the Law of life in ‘loving’ to judge, reject, hate, attack another’s being – but it shines on all equally regardless how it can at different times seem to be.
Our acceptance of relationship is made a choice by an active choice to refuse it. When I see a figure from my past where you are – I don’t see or relate to you but to my past. You likely couldn’t tell me that – for that’s just the underhand trick I learned not to fall for – and now all things are redefined or filtered through the ‘mind’ attempting to escape or redress its past that no one can get through to.
Bodies – and genes have been ascribed roles or functions they never had. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a function. The gene genie is my play on the payoff gotten from believing genes control or determine life. Or any other external factor because nothing knowable is wholly external. Your definition of yourself in relation to your experience is your world. No one believes anything that brings them nothing they want.
As beings of choice I hold for individual will as the freedom to accept – although the will of the whole is not divided and conflicted and reveals and renews a true individual expression of willingness.
If something you say is an illusion – WHO says so … and WHO accepts so?
If its a say so then – if you say so – follow your desire with that.
Is a point you think I am making that sets you to sing with me as if against?
You must know that some hold free will to be the Will of God and others use the same term as license to abuse and plunder, But the form does not the meaning make. So be wary not to take the form out of context as if it had a fixed individual meaning. I don’t have a sense of real difference here.
… and free us of our illusions as we release them from others …
Hi, Politically incorrect foreigner,
You write:
“The second cause for intelligence differences between the sexes could be that high status people (and there is some correlation between high status people, earnings, and IQ) have more boys, while low status people have more girls (the Trivers-Willard effect).”
Would that explain the higher numbers, in absolute terms, of male homosexuality among high status people, or at least in the neighborhoods where they tend to live and congregate together? Probably it does. And if it doesn’t, it’s probably because no one has yet noticed the logically necessary disproportion. But I have. Just now. Right here. On the basis of the “facts” you’ve just provided.
I mean, where there are more boys per capita, there is probably a very good chance that there will be a higher absolute relative incidence of male homosexuality, assuming a natural invariant rate of incidence of that particular sexual deviancy (the Norman-Pilon effect). That just stands to reason.
But then if that is the case, that situation would by itself diminish the reproduction prospects of the intelligence pool of the high status individuals, wouldn’t it? (the other Norman-Pilon effect.)
High status people, therefore and incontrovertibly, as a distinct and separate population tier in society, by the natural invariant rate of incidence of male homosexuality, would have the reproduction potential of their individual and collective IQ so severely curtailed in the long run as to have it tip into an irrevocable trending decline into extinction as the Trivers-Willard effect really kicked into high gear (the second other Norman-Pilon effect).
It would appear, then, that as a species, high status people are doomed to extinction by the laws of the contradictory relation between intelligence and fertility.
(Logic, eh. You can just reason all of this shit out for yourself. No actual need for any empirical data. How am I doing so far, Mr. Politically incorrect foreigner? Am I beginning to get the hang of this?)
Are you a Marxist? Is this a Marxist analysis of the inevitable fate that contradiction has in store for high status people? Because it very suspiciously sounds Marxist in tone.
“Are you a Marxist?”
He writes like a German AfD-er.
Ah! A Marxist AfD-er
Dear Politically Incorrect Foreigner,
While it may be true that there are more males than females with very high IQs, statistically there are also more males than females with the lowest levels of intelligence as measured by IQ. Women’s intelligence varies less than men’s intelligence and that applies as much to people at lower levels of intelligence as at higher levels.
If there are more male geniuses, there are also more male idiots.
And that’s assuming that “geniuses” even exist at all.
“While it may be true that there are more males than females with very high IQs…”
Just think: a test designed, implemented, validated and normalized by White Males… generally validates White Males. Miraculous.
I’m sure the “IQ Tests” given by Israeli Psychologists, to Palestinians, measures something other than various gaps between the vanquished and the victors, too.
To be brutally frank, by Camile Paglia’s yardstick, most people these days, if left to themselves, would be living in grass huts. There are over three billion men alive today and I suspect the vast majority of them have invented very little. Despite having a Y-chromosome, most of us guys have a lot more in common with the gals, creativity wise, than we do with Thomas Edison.
Did Edison invent things? I thought he just filled a warehouse with real inventors and patented everything they came up with while working for him 🙂
I wanted to make a similar remark. But before making it, knowing that Edison had been born into the “middle class” of the 19th Century, I wanted to get a fix on the magnitude of that wealth in terms of what it would be today in nominal terms, but I could not find anything at hand, so I decided to take a pass.
However, there can be no doubt that he was born into “money” and therefore into the “industrial American capitalist” class, which would have put him in a position to, as you put it, fill a warehouse with real inventors and patent everything that they produced under his name — kinda like that guy, Bill Gates, the “inventor” of something or other, too.
What did Gates invent??? A marketing phenomenon? An icon of himself?
The sacred history of scientism is worthy of revision to open a more balanced perspective.
When I first read more of Tesla I cast Edison in less than a light giving contribution – but I don’t now feel to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of people with means don’t make anything of it – and I believe Edison was not well connected within the academic or cultured elites of his day – excepting to have pushed in by bringing inventions that attracted money and fame.
That’s a joke. Is there anyone anywhere who can take credit for “inventing” anything? Are not “inventions” the result of collective efforts, both contemporaneous and between the generations of the past and those of the present?
Genius is collective. It’s not individual, although individuals will delude themselves into believing that what was refracted through them was all of their own doing, and not the result of a myriad of interactions between themselves and the people they borrowed from and with whom they collaborated.
I can see, Norman, that you’ve never heard of George de Mestral or Arthur Fry…!
Who dat?
How quickly you forget, Norm! A) velcro B) post-its! Tell me your World would be worth inhabiting without either!
On the serious side: Antonio Meucci
Who dat, too?
Ach, I forgot… no Google in Canadia…! Larf
The individual serves a role within a collectively whole movement. What you talk of I read as egocentricity.
That also serves a role within a collective insanity!
I feel you want to throw out the baby with the bathwater?
If you have no will but to operate a collective dictate then there IS no will – and life but a machine. If you choose to accept that – that is your will – or a substitution for will by a tricky mind.
When the charge builds up enough , a circuit is found. This can be manipulated – but that too is a circuit operating. The physics of consciousness is experience,
‘Need to know’ drives all. Needs can be anything given priority – and so the felt need to NOT know, can operate an obfuscation by all and any means available. So something ELSE is ‘known’ instead of being. Dislocation. dissociation and alienation begin at home!
In negative states we may feel alone and apart because they are experiences of contraction and a sense of disconnection from the field of relationship, but as an integrated and thus truly positive state, we are aware of and feel life moving us tangibly beyond definition – yet which defines us and our experience clearly. Quite different from thinking through a lens darkly and taking that as a reliable guide.
The collective and Individual are both expressions of a greater embrace. YET both terms can be egoically assigned to dissociated fragmentations and organisations of such fragments. Indivisible means in-dividable. “Divide and rule” goes the maxim, but rule what exactly? How about ‘Divide to rule out wholeness. so as to assert a rejection – and seem to exercise power thereby’. (and be proven or validated by reaction).
Insofar as the illusion of power operates, one may use it to reinforce the illusion, or choose not to use or align in it – and learn instead to trust the movement of being rather than seek a sense of control over it.
A true intelligence bestows to the willing in terms that can be recognized and accepted helpful – if not always immediately so. We may call this inspiration or intuitive breakthrough after great struggle or sacrifice – as if struggle and sacrifice brought it about. They often SEEM to.
Your willingness toward a better quality of life on Earth is not your ego – but your willingness to transcend or release it in reaching beyond illusions – as acceptance of relationship of equal of like nature. Anything else is using relationships for what can be got from them. This is blind – no matter how high or low the IQ score.
Genius is collective. It’s not individual
That’s a very thought provoking statement, Norman. The obvious comeback would be, how collective?
Obviously you are not talking of the entire human collective sharing a collective Nobel Prize for Inventiveness regardless of their individual contributions.
And for the men’s and women’s teams take special pride in the achievements of their own gender is also a bit rich when it takes two genders to create the next generation of geniuses.
I’m old enough to remember when the British took a lot of pride in things that made them the envy of lesser underachieving lands, which included being the homeland of an impressively long list of geniuses. So I can see the point that genius requires a cultural milieu in which to come to fruition.
Jethro Tull, for example, would probably never have invented the seed drill if he hadn’t been educated and well-travelled as well as being a gentleman farmer and living at a time and in a place where there was a practical need for the device and a practical means of making it. This also explains why he didn’t invent the television or the nylon stocking.
But it doesn’t explain why Tull invented things while the vast bulk of gentlemen farmers in his time invented nothing of comparable note. Genius may be collective, but it is exercised through and by exceptional individuals applying their talents, experience and brainpower to specific problems and shouting “Eureka!” and sighing “Back to the old drawing board.”
Are we really saying anything very different? Without a given set of cultural and material preconditions, no one particular invention can ever see the light of day. And one essential ingredient in those preconditions are, of course, the actual humans participating in the activities or practices that ultimately and fortuitously result in “invention.” But no so called “genius” ever created or will ever create anything whole cloth, and that is the better part of the explanation of all human “invention.”
So that’s what I mean when I say, and I think we actually agree, that “genius” is collective, that it is as much or more so the expression of broad cultural preconditions than of anything any one individual could muster on his own , that “genius” as we normally understand it, that is to say, as a designation for people we imagine to have godlike attributes, is actually a mystification of “the” reality of the so called “creative moment,” a self-serving cultural illusion to which the embourgeoised mindset is particularly susceptible.
The term genius may be applied to persons – rightly or wrongly but it points to qualities that are describable.
Egocentricity always ascribes to persons or to a personal capacity, qualities that are embodied in life – for that is the personification of life as a sense of being under our control and according to our word.
Reading of Nicola Tesla currently, the degree of dedication and passionate pursuit for his exploration and discovery in the fields of electro-magnetic principles and applications, became the overriding focus of his life and the subordinating of most all else to the endeavour could easily have cost him his life and nearly did. But regardless his intensity and persistence, he also had great aptitude for learning – and an eidetic memory – in which the working details of an envisioned mechanical device would be trialled and adjusted in specification – from working within his mind. After a whole raft of patents were lost to a fire, he replicated them all from memory. This man held an extraordinary capacity to focus upon and draw practical perspectives from, the phenomena of the physical world and their harnessing. But I note that he wasn’t free from pride of achievement as a sense of personally wresting ‘secrets’ from life as if his was the power of the gift rather than the willingness to receive and embody it.
Einstein said ‘ you can’t solve the problem from within the problem’ – or words close to such effect, and this thinking outside the box is the opening of perspective where before there was none – for everything was framed by and as the problem. So I would say that one can dedicate, align, serve and embody the driving passion of one’s life and as a result access the genius within the joy of such fulfilment lived. Ego in self and others may ascribe this as one’s possession – but I ascribe it as something that comes through a possesses our willingness to align in such as to feel the quality of our life as intensities and intimacies undreamed of to a scattered and superficial consciousness of self conflicting purpose.
Though Tesla’s contribution is significant airbrushed from the record – for reasons not gone into now – they remain fundamentally part of our emergence into an era of electro-magnetic discovery and technology – that went further than was at the time or since – allowed to operate.
Tesla was by no means NOT part of a wave of interest, discovery and invention – yet went far ahead of everyone else in many respects – and has yet to be fully understood or accepted in all that he demonstrated.
My sense of ‘cometh the hour cometh the man’ is not so much a narrative manipulation but as a significant part of a larger expansion and unfolding of Consciousness unto itself – as the human experience. To live and uncover a pathway of support and acceptance for a new perspective within a world that may put great obstacles in the way of, steal or shut down, and abuse or deny them – and yet it is the life they persist in and are the gift of.
The genius is the qualities and capacities accessible to human consciousness that are far beyond the scope of the model and mapping of the collectively accepted identity. So instead of also opening, expanding, and aligning in what truly moves us – we make ‘special’ separate and different – so as to perhaps adulate or use as an icon and associate with – but protect our identity of separated difference from the genius of Life. But of course we can also be inspired to live our passion in our own lives.
(Cultural implications:)
In an era of the lowest common denominator, aspiration is suppressed and associated with egoism – as if the crab barrel world of pulling everyone down to the same level is not egoism in reversal. Collective corparatism as unchecked predation, operates the idea of sacrifice of the lives of others for an idol of private gain or gratification in fear of being predated upon if not attacking first and of having what has been grasped – taken away.
One of the simplest contrasts between a living culture and a dying one is of that which ‘lives’ so as to avoid the feared outcome rather than aligning within the desired outcome. It may SEEM toward a better world to ensure bad things don’t happen again – but it actually guarantees their recycling. The current ‘neoliberalism’ may SEEM to not operate hate agenda – while doing exactly that. The appeal of the identity in righteousness is the trojan exploit of third party manipulation.
While the back-doors of surveillance and hacking are wanted for state directed activity, they are left open to anyone else becoming aware of them. Likewise the devices of guilt’s manipulation is not addressed by a society that believes it profits from using them.
Humanity leaving itself open to being hacked, used, exploited and manipulated while thinking to gain thereby.
The attraction of more light to our consciousness – is in opposition to the attraction to darkness in which to hide or deny while SEEMING to become something in our own right. And claiming possession of such right by protecting the seeming against exposure to awareness of actual. A negative polarity by which choices form separative consciousness – yet which can be re-purposed to align or balance within its original nature as an integrative movement of being – a creative appreciation of being. It isn’t moral coercion that will bring us through but the simple physics of cause and effect brought home. “Divide and rule-out true cause so as to make narrative upon effect” is a phase of an unfolding human Consciousness. How much further can this go – and do you WANT to go there? Rediscovering true Cause is undoing the Past in the present to release the future. But no one can release what they are unaware of dragging along with them while assigning it upon ‘THEM’. Projection makes perception – and perception generates our reaction and experience. Is our perception a ‘gold-backed’ currency or adrift as a matrix of mind-manipulation; the lie and the father of the lie.
Ah but Frank, You have NO sense of the richness of living close to the Earth.
No sense of the tangible richness and depth of communion and communication within the Feeling of being.
No awareness of the Mother of being – without whose denial and subjugation your lording ‘mind’ could not play out its strut.
You surely confuse inventiveness with creativity and intelligence with manipulation.
I happen to be reading a history of Nikola Tesla – amongst a few other things – and note the familiar patterns of conflicted self extending through technological innovation to corporate cartels of closed systems of control.
Some professed to believe that labour saving machines would enable everyone to cultivate their creative capacities. Steve Jobs seemed likewise until perhaps meeting ‘the Man’ behind Disney and attending the market demand for unconsciousness and the ‘duty’ of Power to supply it. (sic).
I’m not anti-invention so much as alert to the context in which and OF which it proceeds – for technology extends the mind of the purpose and intent of its use. This may mask in ‘progress’ – but the marketisation and weaponisation of any leverage for the seeking of private agenda at expense of the whole is In Our Face!
The sub culture of ‘preppers’ anticipate the possibility of having to survive WITHOUT the basket of infrastructure in which all our eggs are invested and dependent. At the other end of the scale. “too big to fail” is used as emotional blackmail.
My sense of progress embraces all that brought me here, to unfold the gift that shares on – as I myself have received. Mr Foxy-Loxy has other ideas… The attempt to validate a present(ation) by demonizing or denying of the past – assigned to devalued ‘others’ – is the sacrifice of living presence to an idol of false promise. But of course perfectly ‘normal’.
As it happens, reeds are not so abundant with current land use – but could be – and thatching makes good roofing. Mud (clay) building is very cheap, very accessible, truly ‘affordable housing’ and offers many advantages over concrete isolationism. But not under corporately weighted regulatory capture and of course NIMBY! (Not in my back yard!).
I feel that beneath misogyny is an anti-nature. Perhaps the only way to develop a sense of independence – but blind to the progression or evolution of its self-idea or consciousness while enamoured of its ascendency.
Most people – if left to themselves – may perish!
Indeed a corporate cartel- collectivism cultivates and milks this lack of consciousness to its own degradation and destruction – in the name of progress.
But in the freedom to explore and discover, I hold that many would uncover and grow resources they did not know they have and open a Life they could not have believed possible within the old paradigm. Though Caesar holds the rules and the power to enforce – the freedom to explore and discover is innate to what mind in desire creates. But what exactly shapes and defines the terrain? The ability to challenge existing reality-belief and experience is the uncovering of self-definition of which we were too busy enacting to be able to question.
So it’s all genetics, eh. Nothing to do with the collective intelligence implicit in a person’s “cultural context” and a contingency of interests and accidental cognitive attributes? A person is just “born” with a high IQ, right? Actually inherits as a matter of course for being a scion of a long line of genetic geniuses? So if, for example, physicist Paul Marmet, in the years that he was alive, had been brought up in the Canadian arctic and been raised according to a traditional Inuit life style, he yet would have scored the same IQ test score as he in fact did raised in a modern urban setting?
And money is a function of brains, right? So that if a kid were born in some backwater mining town where there were no books or libraries to speak of, no one in his family who had an education higher than the level of street, but if he had brains and nothing else at all going for him, why he’d be making a million dollars a year in no time?
Clearly, you must have an incredibly high IQ and can’t wait to share your genius level “score” with us, so that we may deduce your earnings per year and feel the sting of our overwhelming genetic inferiority and foreordained impecuniosity? A genius with nothing better to do on a Saturday night but bray about his brilliance, here, among the riffraff hanging out in the comment section of OffG.
Your name wouldn’t by any chance be Janusz Korwin-Mikke? Maybe once (or twice) removed?
Here is a quote I like from Stephen Jay Gould, you know, the author of “The Mismeasusre of Man:”
And here is something else I like that I’ve pilfered from I don’t know where anymore:
What do you think, Politically incorrect foreigner? Think there is any truth whatsoever in either one of those quotes?
NP, Intelligence is 40 – 80 percent heritable, according to the latest studies. The rest is affected by the environment. For example black children raised by white parents will usually have lower IQ than their parents. Earnings are correlated with IQ. In other words, not all people with high IQ will earn more than people with low IQ, but most high IQ people will earn more than most low IQ people.
Other than that, i’m relatively talkative person, so i see nothing wrong with several comments on topic that is interesting to me. Good night to you too.
Do you have any references to the studies that “establish” that rate of 40% to 80% heritabiliy of intelligence? I’m curious as to how that gets “established.”
And what is that? A black child raised by whites will usually have a lower IQ than his — what? Genetic parents? Or his white adoptive parents. It’s not clear for a low IQ individual just what it is you mean, eh.
IQ is correlated to earnings? So what’s your take on that? Is it the 40% to 80% difference that makes the difference or is it something else? Maybe the color of someone’s skin?
I’m talkative, too. So lets talk, eh. I’m fascinated by all of these deep insights you bring to a discussion of “intelligence” as it relates to different “types” of people. I didn’t you could tell so much from just looking at a person. I’m eager to learn. Will you teach me?
Think the climate denier point is a good place to find the soft edges of Catte’s article. And I don’t have any but bespoke solutions.
The question that arises for me on the one hand is why, in the press, is there a privileging of ‘climate-deniers” points of view when this issue has a scientific consensus perhaps greater than on any other issue? Is not the frustration of people wishing to silence these views based on the amount of time and space given them, determined by capitalist interests and organs of information, rather than the fact that these views have been aired? How much time should we give to, say, a view which attributes to Jesus the current change in climate? Wouldn’t it be absurd to pretend this is the ‘other side’ of the argument? Because details aside, global warming as a phenomenon is the more than settled consensus. Opposing views should by this standard be within this consensus.
Now the contradiction. The problem with applying this standard is something like Western foreign policy, where most of what we read in the Western press is at best teetering on propaganda. If we apply the consensus model to this situation, we destroy the ability to get to the truth.
Yet there is a difference between these two situations. In the first, consensus is determined by scientific rigour, which is not the whole story but much of it. In the second consensus is determined by ‘experts’, including journalists, government officials, business commentators and such. There is no rigour here that would be rejected by the organisers of the 2 minute hate. Problem is ‘experts’ are capitalism’s answer to providing a form of mock ‘scientific rigour’ and there is no political or even just Socratic capacity in Western society to judge the contents that issue from their mouths. That’s left to ‘experts’ called journalists. So one expert aligning with normative values questions another expert, say a politician, sharing those values.
Nice try at fake-issue hawking.
The “denier” position is NOT “privileged” in the media. It’s censored. By people who claim it’s privileged in order to rationalise censorship.
The BBC isn’t refusing to cover alarmists. It’s refusing to cover deniers.
Your bogus claim that “settled” issues don’t need to be discussed and should be censored is already covered and needs no further refutation.
No one needs to censor stupid or insane claims, they are filtered organically by the process of free discussion. They relegate naturally to the hinterland.
As you may well discover from personal experience.
“The question that arises for me on the one hand is why, in the press, is there a privileging of ‘climate-deniers” points of view…”
I “love” people who boldly state the opposite of the obvious truth and expect to get away with it! Very Orwell, but didn’t you get the memo that “Brave New Worldisms” works better?
Here, Google the term “Climate Denial” and have a look at exactly which POV is “privileged” (that is, let’s try to find a search-result which doesn’t smear “Denialism” as a mental illness):
https://www.google.de/search?q=Climate+Denial&oq=Climate+Denial&aqs=chrome..69i57.4847j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
(erratum: “WORK better”)
This “climate denier” idea is worth an article or maybe a graduate thesis all on its own.
When we call someone an “alarmist” or a “climate alarmist”, it is fairly clear that they are seeking to sound or spread alarm about what’s going on with the climate. So the terms in themselves are accurate descriptors, and can only be seen as pejoratives if one disagrees that alarm is warranted.
When you call someone a “denier” or a “climate denier” or even a “climate change denier”, you are no longer using accurate speech. You’ve twisted it.
First of all, using the term “denial” brings strong moral undertones into what is supposedly a scientific issue. It carries the strong implication that the “denial” in question is either pathological (because the denier has psychological issues), contrarian (because the denier is denying for the sake of argument) or dishonest (because the denier has a personal interest in lying). The use of the term denier is thus a means to invalidate all non-consensus opinion and stifle debate on the issue, which is why it fits hand in glove with the slogan “The science is settled”.
But when we consider what the denier, this pariah among men, is actually denying, the use of this pejorative becomes even less credible. One of the most common labels is “climate denier”; but how many people actually deny the existence of climate in the common-or-garden context of the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period?
Fair enough, you may say, but obviously, people who say “climate denier” are using it as an abbreviation of “climate change denier”. But here we have the same problem. How many people actually deny that climate changes? Among the “deniers”, so few that you’ve probably never met one. Among the “believers” or the alarmists, there are people who minimize the extent of natural climate change because they wish to emphasize the extent man-made climate change. But the people who get labelled “climate change deniers” are actually constantly harping on about how it was warmer in the Medieval Warm Period and cooler during the Little Ice Age, etc. So they don’t deny climate changes.
Well then, you say, obviously, people who say “climate denier” are using it as an abbreviation of “anthropogenic climate change denier”. No actually. Most “deniers” are also accepting that human beings can and have changed the climate. They accept that things such as deforestation and urbanization have drastically changed local and even regional climates. If they are aware of the issue, they tend to accept that the Asian Brown Cloud, for example, has and is significantly altering the winter and spring climate in most places from India in the west to Japan in the East. Most of them even agree that on balance, increasing the level of atmospheric CO2 should increase the temperature.
So what are these “climate deniers” actually denying? They are, again for the most part, denying (a) that future climate warming is bound to be catastrophic, (b) that future climatic conditions are predictable decades ahead, and (c) that the science is settled. So they are really not “climate deniers” or “climate change deniers” or even “anthropogenic climate change deniers” at all. They are, for want of better terms, inevitable catastrophic climate change deniers, climate predictability deniers and science settleability deniers.
But these positions are all so reasonable that the alarmists would have a hard time rebutting them or rebuking people for holding to them. So what do the alarmists do? They twist the language like a wet dishcloth until they’ve rung all the subtlety and nuance out of it and they create Newspeak terms like “climate change denier”, “climate denier” or just “denier”. It’s so much easier to get the ignorant to channel the hate when you make the slogans short and non-specific.
This reminds me vividly of some lines from the song Clampdown by the Clash:
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers
One more example of the alarmists’ yob element’s twisted speech that irks me no end is their insistence on referring to carbon dioxide as “carbon”, which is as inaccurate as calling water “wine” or sulfur dioxide “Earl Grey tea”. Anyone so ignorant as to think carbon is a greenhouse gas or so sloppy as not to care (as seems to be the case with some of the Guardian’s editorial staff) is really in no position to lecture anybody about anything.
Well said. Thankyou!
My points here arise from but are not specifically addressed to you or yours.
I note that the corporate body of fear-driven ignorance operates a ‘reversal’ – so that the natural good is demonised and the artificial toxin is promoted as protection. (By ‘corporate body’ I include the willing consumption of such toxicity.). Sunlight and sunscreens (aluminium), saturated fat and margarine (industrial grease), Carbon dioxide and weather modification technology (nano particles of toxic industrial waste) – and global cultural deprivation under a corporatocracy.
The hijacking of the environmental movement to ‘reducing carbon footprints’ is an amazing feat. And tragic unless used to illuminate the device in consciousness by which such deceit operates, to then use fear to draw more illumination and alignment rather than shut it down to a protection racket. But while something is believed protection it will itself be protected as self.
Fear of Life is masked by fear of loss of face and power – which masks itself as the face of power struggle.
Discernment and aversion to toxins – and movement to balance deficiencies – is innate to a healthy cell culture.
A fear-driven mindset triggers us to suppress our nature and invest in power of protection.
The perpetual triggering of the sympathetic nervous system is the deprivation and denial of all else to fear-chemistry and the conditioned imprint of such reactions over time.
The loss of true discernment gives way to ‘expertise’ of a top-down dictate – rather than advisory perspectives that can be weighed and taken into account.
Life is not a top-down dictate. The brain is not The controller, the heart does not pump the blood, the doer is not an independent power. But the wish that that latter be true must interpret all things awry and the demand these be so pulls the distortion of a top-down subjection, as its own reinforcing identity of independence from the life it claims to speak for and protect.
Religious fundamentalism is returning in a big way in the West, despite the fact that no one believes in God or religion anymore. Our god is an overlapping trinity; Democracy, Truth and Freedom. As the ruling elite lose their mandate to rule and legitimacy they are striking back at heretics, people who deny the… Facts.
This is Nick Cohen mashing-up Hitler, Stalin, Chomsky, Assange, Trump and, no kiddin’ Nigel Farage. Normally this kind of paranoid raving would be called a ‘conspiracy theory’, but, as usual, conspiracy is in the eye of the powerful and especially those with access to high-profile meida platforms. Cohen is so full of hate for the enemies of his sacred ‘facts’ that he crosses into something that’s close to self-parody here. There’s a vast threat here to our bourgeois democracy, typified by Nigel Farage, not from the revelations about the Secret State just published by Wikileaks. I think ‘liberals’ like Cohen and the Guardian have completely lost the plot and are going to vanish from history, and the sooner the better.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/11/farage-assange-shameless-illiberal-alliance
When I have looked at such writing, it exemplified the ruse of accusing others of what one’s own (side) already does. ‘Religious fundamentalism’ can mean different things – but as the sign of a locked in offence that turns any and all communication to a weapon to use against the communicator – in self-justified ‘grievance’ – it is antithetical to true religious or spiritual Feeling. For there is no democracy of communication, no honouring of truth nor freedom of choice… in a locked mind – or in the reaction of those polarised against it.
The propagation of personal identity assertions operates obfuscation of the underlying issues – and indeed what the left hand does while the right takes attention.
Well, JKM, women may not be among the top 100 players of “official” chess in the world, but I’m pretty sure you you aren’t either. In fact, I just checked, and nope you aren’t there. I don’t know where you would rank in the “Polish Physics Olympiad,” either. But just going by the chess and little speech, there, could it be that as a man you might be a bit overpaid?
And I know I shouldn’t be saying this in public, but Christ oh good gosh darn, do I know more than just a few men who are dumber than an electric doorbell. At least the latter makes a connection from time to time.
Now I realize that my evidence for thinking that some women (by no means all) are every bit my equals in some respects is purely anecdotal, but it never really occurred to me that I should confirm my impression of this “fact” beyond my own direct experience of them. Are there really “scientific studies” out there comparing the innate and superordinate attributes of masculinity with those of femininity ? And how do they “scientifically” decide what counts as innate and superior? Would it not be better to speak of incidental variations between the sexes and individuals? Well, all of this is very confusing for me. So I think I’ll just leave there and go back to reading Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man: Revised (1996)
Oh, and did I mention that my wife earns a lot, and I mean a good gosh darn more>/b> than I do? But it’s okay. She’s better at solving physics riddles than I am, and plays a game of chess that is by far and away better than my own. I don’t know how she would compare to Polish women, though, because she’s Mi’kmaq, albeit without official Indian status. Thanks to you JKM, I at least now know for sure, on the basis of her chess and physics skills, relative to myself, that she deserves what she earns.
Finally, since we are on the subject of clowns, I just want to say that I like them very much. They are one of the few and genuine pleasures in my life. So please. Don’t take my clowns away by having them silenced.
Thank you.
The IQ Framing operates hierarchy, competition and conflict.
A highly effective elitism of such hierarchical aligning of identity operates a self-destruct for humanity.
No wisdom there – but blinded in a false light.
The balancing within a wholeness of being is NOT the enforcement of ideas of balance or cohesion by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – which operate to maintain off-balance and disorder AS IF Humpty is Fallen.
Fear of something substitutes for belief in something and acts to correct it compound the belief as real in the minds that do so.
If you didn’t have dumb people in your world – but only ‘smarter’ than you – without any change in yourself – you would be the dumb one. However, the self-invalidation carried and transmitted in such evaluations is – as I see it – the fundamental issue.
While we believe we cannot, are no good at, and don’t deserve or couldn’t cope with… Life, we make or accept limitations as hard wired reality of a competitive, conflicting and rejecting humanity – within which some bubble of substitution for joy is sought.
Intelligence, in my opinion, is not individual, but collective. Nothing anyone “knows,” or rather holds in memory — and that is all of which an IQ test is ever a very poor and rarefied approximation — is not an artifact of culture.
Furthermore, the so called IQ test, which is “presumed” to be a measure of something “objective” called “intelligence,” is actually a collection of questions generated out of a specific cultural context applicable only in that context, and then only to a very limited aspect of that context, narrowly pertaining, in fact, to both the sorts of activities performed in academia and those commercial functions subserved by the technocratic and bureaucratic segments of the capitalist workforce.
It’s a filtering tool, in other words, to select individuals who may require less investment in training (i.e., in time and money) to fit them to a very general domain of very specific kinds of institutional or bureaucratic tasks. It’s a “cost” saving measure.
It helps the ruling establishment and segments within that establishment to identify and track from among the workforce people who have already acquired certain skill sets, and skill sets are always learned and come to any person by social contexts in which they find themselves or in which they are reared.
An IQ test is really the equivalent of an interview in which a person is asked to tell the interviewer what he knows about this or that either in general or more specific terms. It tells you less about the overall qualitative nature of the person than about where the person is “from” in socioeconomic terms.
There is no such one thing called “intelligence.” What there is are people and their cultural environments, and variations between individuals and within specific “locales” within cultural environments, that combined together yield a mix of individuals who in comparison to one another end up with both sets of similar and different aptitudes for performing and learning certain kinds of tasks.
The IQ test is merely one filter from among a battery of filtering mechanisms (think of, in the educational setting, of ‘tests’ and ‘exams’) to identify individuals who happen, by whatever means, to already have learned certain very specific skill sets. And people with a so called higher score are being selected for the possibility of serving managerial functions, which in the corporate ranks of the capitalist system of bureaucracy, are explicitly higher status occupations to which obedience from lower ranking and more numerous cadres is due.
In short, a person’s IQ score tells you more about where a person is from and to what he or she has been paying attention to than about a so called cognitive superiority, and though that is the sort of “superiority” that the test score is presumed to be the measure, the imputed superiority is that which is concretely enforced in the hierarchy of the workplace, in other words, it is the imputed authority of the “boss,” but in its most rarefied intimation.
Perhaps you sing to the choir here – but of course the setting of terms of ‘intelligence’ and the setting up of testing and ability to pass tests – is what might be more aptly seen as the elevation of some qualities or attributes at the expense and rejection of others – by the collective interests of the established institutions of the culture of the day. (Including compliance under inducements or threats by which self-interest abandons it representative role).
When people seem most to presume themselves intelligent is in judgement over those whom they despise, have no feeling for and have no penalty from using as a means of self-justification.
As always how we define something in the light of our purpose, determines the result.
If we do not know our purpose we default the conditioned patterns or our particular path and strategy in life. Clearly a conditioned reaction can operate intelligently within the framing of its conditioning, without self-awareness of its condition and under its own sense of being a ‘free agent’ albeit amidst a ‘world of fools’…
My sense of intelligence is more of a connected presence within which I know what I need to know, when I need to know it – not before or after. It is more akin to ‘ask and ye shall receive’ – but asking the one thing in the Universe that does not know the answer is like asking a stone god with its ‘priesthood’ of interpreted ‘answers’.
“Who am I allowed to be?” is not consciously asked – and yet everyone scans a situation constantly for the cues as to what is or isn’t ‘acceptable’
Conditioning may precede and embody in the conditions of our birth and family to social adaptation. There are lots of perspectives – and the Lamarckian idea has recently revived with new discoveries. I feel that when we reject and exclude intelligence that doesn’t fit our identity investment, we limit ourselves and our world.
But in a connected quality of being, we find what serves us and leave what does not – without the interference of a censor or middleman in control. The interjection of the ‘ego’ is the template for the control of the Temple of a true need met – as the imposing of tax and obedience to rule.
So a true need denied and thus un-met seeks to find fulfilment within the particular framing of its own denials. The betrayed seek vengeance. The overlooked and unseen seek fame and attention, the judged against seek retribution. The terrified seek a better hiding place.
Whatever is our current experience or consciousness of of life is the material with which to work, as the operation of purpose – of intelligent direction aligning with clear desire – But we cannot see it within the conditioned sense of self. However, a true sense of joy in life has a natural discernment for ‘negative influence’ and so to live this day well – allows the ‘evils thereof’ to be addressed in their context. It seems ‘smart’ to take things out of context and make new meanings – and assert them – yet that is how Meaning is lost to meaninglessness.
Hi Catte, I’m not sure why you needed to emphasise so strongly that you’re NOT denying man-made climate change. The effect was to give the impression that you actually believe the myth. Afraid of being labeled a “denier”? Denying a lie is an honourable thing to do. Why not try to get your head round the science – and I mean the real [em] science? AGW melts like icicles in the sun when it’s exposed to the facts. It’s a question of science – not of emotion. It might feel [em] right to believe that our reckless treatment of the planet must [em] be having negative consequences – it is! But warming isn’t one of them and CO2 would not be the culprit even if it was!
Just on the issue of fact: can you provide references for your assertion that “Goliath Oil” definitely [em] funds “climate skeptics”?
The intention behind the editorial decision to make it clear this article is not a refutation of manmade global warming is to avoid dilution of the main point.
The point of this article is that “deniers” or dissenters should not be censored even if they are wrong. It’s a discussion of the principle of free speech, not climate science.
There are several places on this site where the truth or not of manmade global warming is being debated. Please confine that discussion to these threads.
If the article was not about climate science, but only about the principle of free speech i.e. specifically the right to have and express ones own opinions – “even if they are wrong” (but who decides that?) – then that was the only point – a general one – that needed to be made.
But the writer chose to use the specific example of AGW and include a specific allegation (subsequently qualified by Norman Pilon) that ‘deniers’ were being paid by Big Oil to challenge the theory. Was that an objective – neutral – position to adopt? Was it not intended to cast doubt on the integrity of (at least some) ‘deniers’? And then there was the point I made in an earlier comment about the unusual emphasis placed on denying that the author was a denier! The effect was actually to suggest that the author leaned towards accepting AGW (and the admin in general?)
In my view all this placed the piece clearly within the AGW debate. If the piece was really just about the principle of free speech, some other example could have been chosen – perhaps an even more controversial one, like ‘holocaust denial’. Would admin uphold the principle of free speech on that too?
Of course, like other commenters, I am ‘on the outside’. I don’t have to worry about the public profile of the site and make difficult decisions about what can – and what cannot – be presented and discussed. It’s understood, of course, that Off-G’s extremely welcome and valuable commitment to the truth represents a threat to various interests, and potentially makes you vulnerable to attacks of different kinds. Of course you have to tread carefully – and in some cases avoid taking an ‘official’ position, whatever you believe privately, leaving it to the commenters to fight it out, with hopefully the best arguments coming out on top.
Yes indeed. ‘Free speech’ if it means the freedom to engage in communication, is not merely of being allowed to speak – but of being able to persist in the communication without being reframed and diverted or ‘rationalized’ away in terms that invalidate or mark out the speaker as a legitimate target for blocking with ridicule or attack.
Schopenhauer wrote on a list of 38 tricks he noted while debating or arguing issues that were being used to appear to ‘win’ the argument without debating the issue. He originally and somewhat naively thought that publishing such deceits would make them transparent and unworkable – but they have been extrapolated and commercialized as ’38 ways to win an argument’ – as a study guide.
One of the reasons we talk of mind-control is a result of such techniques of the ‘dark arts’ being implemented as a discipline ’em’ in place ’em’ of engaging in relationship, as a war upon communication and thus on consciousness itself.
My main point is that while we identify in deceit, we suffer it. And to release that identification means uncovering the ways in which we participate in, subscribe to and hold active correspondences with deceitful manipulations or indeed wishful thinking, asserted and defended as if true.
So I am not as polarised around the idea of ‘free speech’ as I am willing to seek and find the conditions of communication. In a world made of lies, honesty is a language no one will understand. Only a willingness FOR relationship and communication ’em’ can ’em’ engage it. To the framing of communication and relationship in terms of leveraged outcomes – there is only manipulation in the ’em’ form ’em’ of relationship.
This ‘mind’ is in a sense an imposter, and its collective ‘the matrix’ of enslavement under a fake reality.
Em… I tried ’em’ – maybe /em emphasis /em (testing)
Perhaps I should have stayed with my original use of CAPS for the emphasis of key words.
“Just on the issue of fact: can you provide references for your assertion that “Goliath Oil” definitely [em] funds “climate skeptics”?”
And please, everyone on both sides of this issue, do note that the funds received from “Goliath Oil” by the skeptics in this instance was less than 1/2 of one percent of what the “promoters” of the AGW hysteria received in half as many years. So the next time you hear all about the liars being bought and paid for by Big Oil, compare the amount of research money received in absolute terms by the “hysterics,” and ask yourself where, on which side of the debate, the real money making opportunities really are.
[edited by Admin to correct formatting]
The resort to vilifying and criminalising perceived rival or challenge to a reality investment gives power to the mob – as in shaming and blaming and for example forcing out of a career position, – and the mob – as in calling on the power of state to ban or penalise such a one. The former can be propagated by PR and media but the latter power is backed by the state.
That communication COULD arrive at a win win outcome is not risked or considered by the breaking off and shutting down of communication behind attack on the person. And so increasingly a currency that could serve better outcomes is corrupted by marketing and weaponising a pre existing agenda.
And a New Babel ‘descends’ upon the towering apex of ‘Civilisation’ in which specialised and compartmentalised bubble realities speak only to themselves. For if true communication were allowed – we would recognize and align in truth – and that means we would no longer play the illusion of dictating truth and forcing life and others to fit our judgements as to what I or you or anyone says SHOULD be.
I feel not to join in the negative worship of blame figures but to discern more clearly what the beliefs and ideas are that determine why people act as they do and why I react to them as I do. Personality is the level of the masking of reality – and can be played as IF reality. I feel the wish to play that is the wish to control life and others – (so as to get from or get away from) – and thus we experience being controlled and being excluded, unheard, unseen and isolated. It goes with the territory. Part of that mind set, is the capacity and proclivity to seek out the fault and the guilt in the Other – and justify our withholding or withdrawal – as the presentation of a mask by which to hide our thought and seek validation and reinforcement in others for the protection (non-exposure) of the mask – in which someone ELSE is assigned blame. Not that blame belongs in oneself either – but that’s another story. See if you can NOT resort to blaming in bringing critical perspective to another with whom you have areas of disagreement. The insight to how our mind is trained to work is an inspiration to retrain it – in my experience. But of course this requires questioning our own narrative assertions and beliefs rather than seeking contrasts by which to reinforce them.
I signed the petition – and now regret doing so.
As you point out, this individual’s use of a Nazi-style salute was not as it was presented by his detractors.
I still think he is stupid in claiming that women are less intelligent than men.
When women have been suppressed by patriarchal systems for millenia, how can anyone know the truth?
I think there is an unfortunate trend in modern-day society fueled by a rapacious 24/7 mass media.
That trend is to rush to judgment.
Everyone, including me, must take time to establish the true facts of any situation before coming to a judgment.
Like you, I support free speech in full.
The only time it should be constrained is when the person abusing it does so to cause physical harm.
Urging others to physically attack other others is justifiably banned.
One final point: I remember studying Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” as a student, as I had found out that both Hitler and Mussolini had studied it too.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind.
Written in 1895, it still provides insights into the modern wave of populisms in the US, across Europe and other parts of the world.