While it may make a lot of people feel good about themselves at the moment, it will only further corrode trust in the rule of law— a shift that always favors the powerful—and take valuable energy away from the urgent task of fighting massive and systematic government and corporate assaults on our dignity and freedom.
Who Ultimately Wins in a Society of Flash Mob Moralists? Read Journal Article
Those simple instructions are comforting, now that our lives also come with their own set of instructions. Those superiors who somehow missed their destinies in writing instructions for plastic ice cube trays now work in public health. Pay no attention to the accumulated knowledge from prior generations. For goodness sake don’t read for yourselves, despite virtually everything being available online. And at all costs remember that children do not deserve special attention.
I will take the fear and turn it into fearlessness. I will take the censorship and speak out louder than ever. I will take their suffering, and turn it into bliss and jubilation. I will take the silence of those dark years, and turn it into forever-lasting remembrance. We can and will survive and thrive.
Has the person who believes two contradictory statements at the same time in some way transcended reason, and entered into a religious dimension? Or has he simply lost his mind?
It’s Not Cognitive Dissonance. It’s Doublethink. Read Journal Article
The reality is that people do still vote for their captors. They really do not want to admit the damage they have been party to, even if that damage is to their own children, their own businesses, and their own communities. The big takeaway is that what Charles MacKay said in 1841 really does hold: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Recovering senses takes years, not months.
Human beings are tribal by nature. We instinctively divide the world into an “us” and a “them”. It’s a mental shortcut. It relieves us of any responsibility to engage in deeper discernment. It protects us from risk. If we just stick with our own people, — or so the argument goes, — then we will be safe.
What passes today for ideological convictions, in our supposedly terminally divided country, are nothing of the sort, but rather labels to which many quickly and lightly affix themselves precisely because they haven’t really thought deeply about what they believe and why, but don’t want to be seen as being out of step, or of not having really done their homework.
Like people, paradigms get tired, mostly because the humans that work within them, as Kuhn suggested, increasingly lose touch with the problems that originally elicited in them the intense and sacrifice-laden drive to create urgently desired new things. But humans aren’t always very good at recognizing when they have begun going through the motions. This is especially so with those in the thrall of a purely linear vision of time in which the perennial reality of intellectual and spiritual regression is afforded no legitimate space.
A truly prosocial approach would not shut out all other goals and insist on one way forward. It would take into account the different priorities and viewpoints of various factions or individuals, approach them with respect, and ask how to best facilitate some sort of harmony among their needs. Instead of prescribing behavior onto others it would advocate for dialogue and open debate, and it would celebrate differences of opinion.
Oster’s implicit claim that next-to-nothing was known about SARS-CoV-2 – and therefore all the pointless, unethical, and illegal things people were forced to do are understandable – isn’t the pathway to healing, because it’s dishonest. Inexplicably, she denies that, from the get-go, we knew Covid’s stratified risks and the harms of coerced interventions.
Osterism Won’t Prevent March 2020 From Happening Again Read Journal Article
There are other good reasons to think the onslaught is not over, that we are at the moment in a ‘phony war’ while enemy forces regroup. Inflation, energy, food, surveillance are all active fronts in the broader battle. It hardly matters which one will flare up next.
It Was a Short Time Ago and Never Happened Anyway Read Journal Article
The pandemic along with the slogan, “Trust the science” has altered the desired perspective from one of healthy skepticism to blind acceptance. Such non-critical acceptance of any data, let alone research occurring at “the speed of science,” should give pause. Science moves forward when objections are made and hypotheses are fine-tuned, not when agreement ensues simply because an authority has decreed it so.
Science Misconceived: How the Covid Epoch Wrecked Understanding Read Journal Article
