I think you are missing some incredibly important factors in the transformation
of the progressive left. Following the fall of communism the UK Labour party
abandoned any Marxist critique of capital, class struggle and its support of the working classes in favour of Nietzsche and Foucault and the critique of power. This is most evidenced in Anglo sociology and its texts concerning language as power,
critical power/discourse analysis and of course critical gender and cultural
studies which are all based in sociology. Because Foucault has been associated with postmodernism this had led to a twisted understanding that woke politics is somehow aligned with postmodernism when it is not.
What was significant about this shift was they have showed a tendency not to
critique power in its institutional or public sphere settings i.e. a focus on the abuses of power by governments, markets, financial institutions or corporations, but shifted their critical attention to personal relationships in the private and conversational spheres. What is key here is that they could only retain some kind of political momentum within the logic of the critique by maintaining a very partial reading of Foucault and an overly simplistic description of power’s operations as always being characteristic of acts of oppression and resistance as a very strict binary opposition in line with a highly reductive form of structuralism.
Anyone reading Foucault to his conclusions would know that logically he was always forced to concede that power could never be simply negative in its operations and must also be a positive, constitutional force. If you wish to analyse everything in terms of ‘power’ explaining the world [which I don’t] then you must concede that power necessarily produces or constructs us as we are complicit in accepting it as a banal and generalized force functioning along the lines of Stockholm Syndrome. To some extent this helps explain the unwillingness of a good proportion of the population to give up Covid lockdowns and restrictions as they have been absorbed into their very personal and social identities. Power constructed them to understand and preserve themselves ‘as such’ in terms of their personal and social meaning in terms of the sacrifices that involved them making.
The progressive stripped down ‘political’ concept of power becomes a depressing ideological straitjacket which leads its holders to view all of powers actions as forms of abuse. This becomes something closer to a psychological disorder than a valid academic discipline as its view holders cease to be able to cope with the complexities of social reality and are forced to seek out echo chamber safe spaces. Its such a bleak and empty world view. Armed only with power as an explanation for everything, when sociologists took to analyse the work place and found work place jokes and a sense of humour they were logically forced to situate humour in their ideological category of ‘resistance’. A theory so perverse as to try and steal jokes from us. A world where quite literally nothing is funny anymore. Of course now they are attempting to cancel wrong think comedians everywhere.
The problem with this reductionist view of power struggles taking place everywhere is that they are ubiquitous, eternal, irresolvable and often presented in terms as to provoke violence between parties. Another revelation of the extent to which Nietzsche has some to dominate thinking of the progressive left was that he despised popular culture and encouraged the notion of elite supermen and superwomen. The progressive elite of supermen have inherited this same trait and now they despise the working classes, populist politics and culture.
In specific regards to the Neoconservatives a very important element was Tony Blair’s shifting of the UK Labour party’s philosophy of democratic socialism to one of economic Neoliberalism and the philosophy and geopolitics of Neoconservatism. In a letter to George Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq it was made clear that Blair saw no difference between his own views and those of the ‘so called right’. Bear in mind that the so called right of Bush’s government of that time was chock full of neocons and signatories to the PNAC. After the invasion of Iraq and the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction then in order to try and justify the invasion the progressive left in their “Euston Manifesto” effectively reproduced and rewrote the Neocon ‘liberal fundamentalist’ philosophy behind the ‘Project for a New American Century’ effectively reduplicating its ideology and foreign policy. It is telling that the very same year “The Euston Manifesto” was published and the Neocon baton effectively handed on to the progressive left that the PNAC was formally shutdown. It simply no longer needed to exist now that the left was carrying its child. This new neoconized progressive philosophy spread from the UK left across the Atlantic and the same ideology was adopted by the US democrats. This explains why the US democrats have since been far more hawkish on wars in the Middle East and with Russia than most of the GOP, who have always held a healthy distrust of the Neocons. Sadly all forms of fundamentalisms are dangerous be they ‘liberal’ or Muslim. Unfortunately liberal fundamentalism is the most dangerous as they hold all the weapons and institutional global power.
The key concept behind the Neocon philosophy originating with Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol is the notion of its superior ‘moral clarity’ which was used to justify invasions and regime change operations in the Middle East. Leo Strauss incidentally was another philosopher highly influenced by Nietzsche.
What is interesting about the woke appropriation of the Neocons superior moral clarity is that they applied it not just in terms of geopolitical foreign policy but expanded it for domestic use within their critical power studies in the private sphere. The woke could then proceed to declare to be occupying an even higher and clearer moral high ground than the Neocons ever did. Besides, full on Neocons such as the now Woke Bill Kristol have no problems adopting woke ideology as they come at no real cost to governments and do not threaten the economic, MIC or other deep state orders. The oppression/resistance opposition is continually deployed to divide and fracture societies by class, creed, gender, race and even sexual orientation.
All of this is somewhat ironic when one listens to Neocons such as Douglas Murray
lamenting on the state of woke when they had been the people who destroyed the
liberal concept of relativism in the first place. It was the Neocons who campaigned to discredit moral relativism since the late 90s. In the British library 90% of the books
which are critical of concepts of ‘relativism’ were written after the year 2000. As a result what we seem to have lost is all forms of relativism or nuance, cultural relativism, political relativism and all politics has descended into the most crude form of structuralism as a set of binary oppositions between a progressive left and an extreme far right, good and evil. etc etc all maintained by the strict application of completely inappropriate ‘labelling’ with no regard for any theoretical evaluation of relativity, nuances or complexities in differing perspectives. A good example of this recently has been how Russell Brand came to be categorized as far right.
So now our political world appears as something more akin to “Alice through the Looking Glass” where everything has been turned on its head. In embracing Nietzsche, Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and corporations the progressive #PfizerLeft are in actual fact extreme right wing fascists with all their totalitarian trappings who are totally on board with the WEF and their great reset.
These are important distinctions to be made because anyone criticizing any of this as ‘left wing’ or ‘communist’ will automatically be marched into the camp of the far right even if they are doing nothing more than asserting fundamental liberal principles such as democracy, civil liberties, freedom of speech, national, consumer and bodily sovereignties etc. It is a strategic imperative that we correctly identify this new political era as being manifestly a fascist or even Pfascist phenomenon so we can occupy an old school liberal centre ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4e8lSQy64c
https://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/993329.html
I enumerated all the recent attacks that have been launched against our society; Coordinated riots, attacks on the president, Russia-hoax, covid, lockdowns, election fraud, forced poisoned vaccinations, shortages, now possibly war [ or who knows ].
It is very unlikely that all of these things have just 'happened" organically. These have come as a series of attacks, one after the other, and with the complicity of the people in the highest offices of our institutions. Its an attack by an enemy who has corrupted and infiltrated our system to an incredible level.
The admirable reaction to this is ‘we need to fight and take back our country!’. The problem is, most of us are completely dependent on the very people and the very system that is being used as a weapon to destroy us.
You cant fight an enemy that controls your water supply. Cant be done. You cant fight an enemy that controls your food distribution. You can’t fight an enemy that controls your power supply. They can AND WILL [very soon if my suspicions are correct ] turn your lights out and starve you to death. They are already threatening to do that [ see the WEF ].
We need to go BACK to the basics of resilience and 8 forms of capital. We need to build a parallel structure. No army marches into a place and just starts fighting. More important than the fighting are the logistics. The supply lines, the communications networks, the bunkers, the barricades, the storage facilities, the fortresses. You cant fight an enemy and ask it to keep your water flowing and lights running…you see our position?
I have posted this before but this seems a good time to re-post. Regardless of one’s religious belief system, I think everyone, everywhere, can find something to appreciate in this astoundingly beautiful composition and videography.
I have begun a new routine of watching this before starting my day, and the last thing I look at before going to bed. For me, it brings a sense of calm and peace to my heart, and helps to still my mind.
I hope each of you can find some form of solace in this. That it will help instill strength of purpose to weather the rapidly escalating storm all of humanity is facing.
The World Blessing 2022
Be well and be strong fellow tribe members! ???
Chris-thanks for all you do.
Freedom Convoy - Speech by Canadian Army Major Stephen Chledowski | IrnieracingNews - YouTube
When this very corrupt system begins to be taken down from the inside, the future has a chance of being more just and positive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8hQ1NdHTdQ
That’s an awesome video, BResilient; thanks for sharing!! I wonder how long it takes for YouTube to censor it…
I watched Event 201 and it would have been better if they followed the panel members line of thought. They were talking about repurposing AIDs patients drugs to give to the pandemic infected, replacing the drugs with something else. One guy on the panel said, the AIDs patients are sick too. Controlling the media and messaging seemed to be their primary focus so they seemed effective. The rep from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said, (this is a paraphrase) Two thirds of the American people believe a vaccine can be developed in two month. This is the height of magical thinking. I agree. As a nurse, I experienced people routinely grossly over estimate medical interventions in treating their diseases. That bothers me about Trump, Warp Speed, and his magical thinking or was it?
I fully support the Anti Mandate Truckers. I fear for our DC Trucker Convoy. I know they will be treated as insurrectionist. As a retired federal law enforcement officer, I know FBI assets will infiltrate their ranks and entrap them. I’ve seem what the FBI has done in the prison, where I worked, to set people up.
Then there is the Epstein death. Do you know how many people had to be involved in that? I do. A lot! I looked at the autopsy photos, my husband (also a retired LEO) and I agree. The lividity on his body appears on his left side, upper back, and head. That was the lowest point of his body after he died. He was most likely lying on his bunk with his head and left shoulder on the floor. Also the injuries to the neck, appears to be an electrical cord. The noose shown, is not the noose used in his death. I’ve personally cut nooses from inmates necks, they are tied tightly around their necks so one has to cut through the noose to get it off. One cut to cut then down and one cut to cut through the noose. This rant is to illustrate the level of the corruption in our government.
I fear for the DC Truckers Convoy. Is there another strategy? Can’t the same thing be achieved by truckers just refusing to drive until demands are met? There could be a representative group that delivers the demands similar to a Teamster strike. The truckers are right. I 100% support them too. I just want them to be smart and win.
Prep and get ready to tough things out for awhile. Our freedom is worth it.
…that my bet on how the collapse goes big is with a war. It solves so many problems for TPTB: martial law (or heavy restrictions), rationing (how does three gallons of gas a week sound?), MIC gets to play with their newest toys, takes the public’s attention off the clusterF that was COVID and the official response to it (incl the jabs, which will evidently really start killing/maiming/injuring people bigtime right about now), and finally – and most importantly – provides cover for the collapse of the economy/financialized ponzi scheme.
They’ll say, “Well dang, we had employment growing and we were back on track and then that evil Putin dude went and picked a fight!”
I still can’t really believe this is it. But it sure feels like it.
Thought: our triple-jabbed military, many thousands of miles from home, will take a severe whupping (as will our NATO allies) from the Russians, who probably have plenty new toys of their own and hundreds of years of history of attacks on the Rodina coming from the West. They do not have a sense of humor about this sh!t, and they – if they must – will be out to prove a point such that nobody gets the bright idea to pick a fight with them anytime soon. Their supply lines can be measured in thousands of meters. Ours? Thousands of miles… How’s that gonna work out for us?
And while we’re busy getting humiliated in Europe, China will sliiiiiide across the straight of Formosa and quickly digest Taiwan. To the extent anybody here thinks our gov is compromised by the CCP, this might be the entire point of this pointless fight-picking. Serves three purposes for China: embroils their two biggest rivals in a ridiculous f*cking conflict, humiliates their biggest rival (US), and allows them to reabsorb Taiwan.
In which case, anything containing a semiconductor just went up 10x in price. IF you can locate any units to buy.
I’ll be in the orchard. The oranges and lemons are spectacular this year. And the figs ain’t bad either…
Love to this tribe! Mahalo Dr. Chris! VIVA – Sager
A general strike by the drivers would almost certainly be a better idea. Might not beat a convoy in the optics department but better in every other way. Many more drivers could be involved, it would cost them alot less $$, and the impact would be greater. It wouldn’t take much to throw the supply chain in complete chaos. The freight market is very tight as it stands.
it is very easy to get sucked in by trolls. there is an expectation here of rational discussion. that includes data/facts. opinions clearly are welcome. they are however needed to be supported by data/facts. it is well to remember everyone has certain body parts just like opinions.
it is a waste of time and bandwidth to clutter up threads with responses to posts that are devoid of data/facts. it also clutters up threads that have useful information. it is tiresome to wade through posts that do not add to the dialog.
the forums have become so cluttered they are almost useless. let’s try to keep the main threads as concise as possible.
this has been a public service announcement sponsored by nobody.
Another revelation of the extent to which Nietzsche has some to dominate thinking of the progressive left was that he despised popular culture and encouraged the notion of elite supermen and superwomen.There is too much racket here to give your post the attention it deserves, however I take time out to answer this snippet. How can everybody be exceptional? How does one become an outlier if everybody is? Anyway evolutionary psychologist Dr. Edward Dutton notes that the average intelligence has been falling since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution took the evolutionary pressure off, allowing everybody the opportunity to survive and breed. Hence the invasion of the world. This evolutionary pressure is being re-applied as we speak. So I think that we can dismiss any claims of the mob to being Superman. There is a psychological descriptor for this condition. My money is with the Whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. No matter how dumb the individual is, (in spite of his protestations to the contrary), the combined might of the Internet and the hard-gained wisdom of our ancestors is an awesome combination. I note in passing that evolutionary competition on the individual level is and always has been ferocious. For your amusement and delight I add this extract from wikipaedia's entry on Claws.
Schwab has been married since 1971 to Hilde Schwab. The couple live in Schaffhauserin in Switzerland and have two adult children, Nicole Schwab, co-founder of the Gender Equality Project in 2009, and Olivier Schwab, who is married to a Chinese woman and heads the WEF office in Beijing.[18]A Chinese woman? Has she no name? Merely some Asiatic or another? Racist much?
“While that might “only” be 1/100 or 1/200, the impacts were horrifying.”
Where is the data? Does this refer to some anecdotal evidence, some extrapolated VAERS opinions or what? Perhaps it might be only 1 in a million? almost 10 billion doses but the world’s economy hasn’t collapse because of horrifying impacts to its vaccinated population.
Which countries used early treatments effectively? You were spot on with some of your early work on this virus, including the lack of well designed studies into some of these early treatments. That was unconscionable but that criticism is not a substitute for good data.
It seems many now rely on the rogue doctors who have lucrative subscriber bases on various platforms, built through challenging the prevailing narrative. They aren’t going to give up that income easily.
Omicron has given us, a possibly temporary, reprieve. Some think it is providing a natural vaccine. Hopefully, that’s true and the reprieve will last a good length of time before the next more virulent variant emerges. However, long COVID is a worry as it’s incidence rate seems far higher than even hospitalisation rate and some countries have expanding dedicated clinic networks to treat it. Long COVID is often overlooked by the contrarians (though not all of them - Nicole Foss is anti-vaccine but is concerned about long-COVID).
Chris’s early work did properly raise the alarm about the virus, though he often pointed out the preprint status of some of the research he reviewed. He later used other preprint research and anecdotes to bolster a different narrative and I’ve always wondered why he started to change that narrative and use weak arguments to do so.
It seems he now is happy for a small minority to hold countries to ransom to force their views on the vast majority. That is perhaps the saddest comment he’s made.
Unless ‘things’ have ‘changed’?
“By the time you got to the first Bush administration, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they came out with a national defense policy and strategic policy. What they basically said is that we’re going to have wars against what they called much weaker enemies and these have to be carried out quickly and decisively or else there will be embarrassment—a way of saying that popular reaction is going to set in. And that’s the way it’s been. It’s not pretty, but it’s some kind of constraint.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/03/noam-chomsky-populist-groundswell-u-s-elections-future-humanity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+(naked+capitalism)
Chomsky’s a chump. They all double down on the lies.The lines are drawn and clear. I would argue the discussion really needs to take on a more combative offensive unifying tone. Enemy number one is Their mass media propaganda machine. Can anyone think of something more pressing that we develop the ability to pierce or overcome!?? It’s not like we can wait till there’s an election.
Near the beginning of the C0VID madness, I found your videos, and my husband and I started watching them. They were incredibly informative and started us on the path of “lab created, let’s not participate in the vaxxine madness.”
For the record, in October or November of 2020, the FDA did have a page up on the possible side effects of mRNA shots. All the possibles have been confirmed. I suspect that page has been memory holed.
So I got a call from a friend today in law enforcement. He said that a friend of his (who works in Satcom) called him (can’t remember if he said today or yesterday) and said, “remember the conversation we had about me ever going remote? I’m going remote, please keep an eye on my parents.” My friend said that the conversation they had regarding “going” remote was that if his friend said he was going remote, that meant he is going to an undisclosed location and will be out of communication. My friend also said that his friend said, “keep your eye on what’s going on in Washington”. I asked him what that meant and he said, “keep an eye where people are going”.
My friend also said that he heard about a tail watcher (guy that tracks flights) reported several flights from the DC area to the Colorado Springs area recently. This is all coincidental but i mentioned this today to another friend who is a trooper and he said that’s funny today I pulled over two different guys in military uniforms for speeding - Northbound on I-35 about an hour South of Duluth, MN. Duluth has a large Air National Guard base - one of their planes was scrambled to take down a 9-11 hijacked plane. On this same thread, I’ve seen a couple of very recent Canadian prepper youtube videos regarding him getting intel on movements of sensitive cargo - to I’m assuming Ukraine and other such information.
“The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1udJVoXUPg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBt8g5NR9O4
Pgp. I was hoping to refrain and not respond to this nonsense. I get lost in your real point, if any. Your prose seemed to lack context and was based on pure supposition.
But let me get this right; you are saying that medicine is new, and we dont know jack. So, please don’t use out-dated medicine, as it is too antiquated. We don’t know much, and certainly there is no place in knowing nothing, in trying things we have used before with success, because we need a new novel approach. Something to this this effect, is what I understood from your post.
Let me tell you something, maybe new for you, this small secret in life: You know how you know something? When you have done it and it produces the results you expect, and you can repeat it confidently and successfully. I will take empirical and anecdotal medicine well before any contrived selective data biased study done by big pharma.
And also your conclusion that the lockdowns was the cause of omicron becoming highly infectious and less lethal is totally based on thin air. In fact, if you did know anything about the years of virology that we do understand, and can duplicate, selective pressure favors this and it has zero to do with any behavior such as sheltering. This opinion by you was painful to read.
Moving on to the hindsight thing. It sounds like with all that has happened, you don’t even have 20/400 hindsight, when it should clearly be nothing less than 20/20.
As I have always said, you do not need a crystal ball to predict the future, when the you can see what is happening now. So not only should hindsight be perfect, foresight is pretty clear and obvious, and Chris definitely is pretty good at reading what it happening now, and what that means later. Again, no crystal ball needed.
i think we found the same hill.
oh and the thing i posted about feeding trolls? i should have said “rinse and repeat” as many times as necessary to avoid engaging.
this has now entered the action phase. we don’t have time to waste on irrelevancies.
the best response to trolls is no response. they live to get responses and be a distraction from “intent”.
It seems to me that covid was deadlier earlier in the pandemic than it is now and I know where I live we wore masks with very high compliance and had very little covid, but we also had excellent contact tracing and caught and isolated people before it got to community spreading, until last summer.
I can’t unsee the videos showing the velocity of that which escapes our mouths with talking with and without a mask. I can’t unsee or ignore the importance of the size of the inoculum if you do get infected and masks reduce exposure, especially when a person doesn’t know they are infected.
Where I live, there was so little covid, I only used a fresh mask about once every 3-4 times out, but once we opened and covid started going up, every time I was out it was a new mask. I’m not sure that people were changing masks as often that they should.
I don’t see how your earlier presentations on masks were somehow wrong. I still think masks should be required on public transport and in shops. People should stay home if they are sick.
I am completely with you on the fact that there isn’t an excuse for attacking early treatment instead of embracing it, and there also isn’t an excuse for misleading the public about saying it is safe when it has so many side effects and some a very serious and permanent. The vaccine has prematurely killed people that I tend to think these people would not have survived covid. Early treatment options don’t prematurely put people at risk like the vaccine.
I don’t think the early response was wrong, but by the fall of 2020, and December 2020 at the latest there should have been fully implement early treatment around the world, and the messaging campaign should have been for early treatment rather than the vaccine.