Category Archives: Culture war

Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

The biggest impediment to free speech is people’s belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It’s the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don’t know it.

What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.

[. . .]

This problem can be addressed simply by bringing awareness to it in every way we can. Manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening, so drawing attention to it and describing how it happens in as many ways as possible helps people start seeing through it.

The Metaphysical Presumptions of Science

Are derived from Christianity, says Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson, while interviewing British theologian, academic and author Dr. Nigel Biggar (under the title “Separating Good from Evil in the British Empire“), gives a brief lecture on the five metaphysical presumptions of science. He says (link prompted):

They are metaphysical presumptions which you have to accept before you can operate as a scientist.

You have to believe there is a logos or logic in the objective world. Youi have to believe there is an objective world. You have to believe that that logic is apprehensible. You have to believe that apprehending that logic is a moral good. Because otherwise why would you bother? And then you have to believe that truth in relation to that apprehension is the most important orienting principle.

Those are all metaphysical presumptions. I actually think they are metaphysical presumptions that are derived from Christianity itself, which is why science emerged in Europe and not elsewhere.

The truth about the BBC’s war on ‘disinformation’

The new BBC Verify project reflects the cultural elites’ paranoid fear of free speech.

Article by Fraser Myers

The BBC not only inflates the dangers of social-media falsehoods, it has also applied the disinformation label to stories that are actually true. So if you cause a fuss about anti-car traffic restrictions coming to your local area, if you protest against eco-plans for a ‘15-minute city’, you could find yourself branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on the BBC – even though these illiberal traffic schemes really are happening across the UK. All too often, the charge of ‘disinformation’ is used as another way of demonising those with dissent opinions.

Meanwhile, the BBC has been known to spread untruths of its own. Take its coverage of the trans issue. The BBC website regularly describes predatory men, including rapists, paedophiles and murderers, as ‘women’ – purely because they ‘identify’ as such. It has produced news reports and whole documentaries about ‘men’ getting pregnant. When licence-fee payers are told to ignore the evidence of their own eyes in this way, we shouldn’t be surprised that the BBC is losing trust.

Climate change is another major blindspot for the Beeb. Despite their apparent concern about climate misinformation, BBC journalists and presenters frequently make alarmist and false claims about the environment. A recent Panorama documentary, fronted by the BBC’s climate editor, said in its opening sequence that extreme weather events are killing more people. The truth is the precise opposite: the death toll from weather events has actually fallen considerably in recent decades. But this does not fit the established, fear-driven narrative.

[Links to various other websites in the original text.]

The new brand of totalitarianism

Similar to fascism of old

Justo González in his book “The Story of Christianity” (Volume 2, p. 309), writes about the different “flavours” of fascism in the first half of the 20th century. There were many differences, but what united them was this:

“The glorification of war, dread of the free exchange of ideas, a totalitarian nationalism, and opposition to all forms of egalitarianism”

Today, we have the glorification of war (against Serbia, then Irak, then Syria, then Ukraine – and a denial that there is any glorification involved), dread of the free exchange of ideas (“cancel culture” – and a denial of its existence), a totalitarian globalisation, and a new form of racism (“whiteness is bad”), which is part of a “hierarchy of (alleged) victimhood”.

Hate & Perversion in the Catcher in the Rye

It's "only three-quarters of a great novel"

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” when I was 18, and was disturbed by it. This review by Spencer J. Quinn of J.D. Salinger’s famous novel goes some way in enabling me to verbalise what exactly it was that disturbed me.

Excerpts:

Literature can shape the way we look at the world — even without our knowing it, or being beware of the specific literature in question. A Bible verse shared during a church service or a few lines of poetry offered in a classroom can have this effect. With novels, well-drawn characters can stick with us until we view life through their fictional eyes. I imagine Ernest Hemingway had this in mind when he claimed that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” There is a little of Huck Finn in all of us, in other words.

By the 1960s, however, Huck Finn had been largely replaced by Holden Caulfield in the American imagination. Despite what an original character Holden is and how deftly author J. D. Salinger developed him in the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, that’s hardly a good thing.

[…]

Holden Caulfield is indeed a wonderful, unforgettable character. But then why is The Catcher in the Rye only three-quarters of a great novel? Why is it bad that Holden has replaced Huck as the character through which so many Americans see their world?

[…]

None of this would be to the detriment of the novel had Salinger not molded Holden as the poster boy for revenge-minded alienated youth. Holden is treated so sympathetically by Salinger, especially at the end, that the reader is constantly tempted to view life through Holden’s jaundiced eyes — as if it’s the world that’s at fault, not Holden. This is dangerous. Given the connection between The Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, and others like him, yes, this is dangerous. Huck Finn may have viewed himself as an outlaw for helping Jim escape slavery, but he never saw himself as a predator constantly at odds with most of humanity the way Holden Caulfield seems to be at times.

What further enables the psychopath-as-hero reading of The Catcher in the Rye is the fact that so little is nice in Holden’s world. So much of it is dingy, seedy, or vomity, and, boy, does Holden Caulfield love dwelling on that. Other than during his dreamy walk through the museum, Holden fixates on the ugly and the revolting in New York City, as if that’s all there is. And his penchant for exaggeration doesn’t help. A hotel lobby smells like “50 million dead cigars.” Walking down steps to the sidewalk, he nearly breaks his neck over “10 million garbage pails.”

Even worse, Salinger normalizes sexual perversion. In a hotel Holden finds “a few pimpy-looking guys, and a few whory-looking blondes.” Through the open windows of his hotel, he sees a man trying on women’s clothing and a drunken couple squirting alcohol at each other from their mouths. “The hotel was lousy with perverts,” he states.

[…]

Most tragically, when a man Holden admires touches him inappropriately and forces him to flee into the night, Holden wasn’t even terribly surprised. He admits that “perverty” things like that have happened to him “about twenty times” before. Rounding that down to the more accurate-sounding once or twice, we still have the normalcy of perversion. It’s as if most American boys in Salinger’s world are forced to deal with unwelcome come-ons from grown men.

Who wouldn’t want to shoot up a world like that?

With such a splendid character as Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye could have been a much greater contribution to Western literature. Salinger only needed to tone down the murder in Holden’s heart and the perversion in Holden’s world. Instead, however, he was happy to paint the world to be a darker place than it really is, and make it cool to hate your fellow man.

“Question authority”

"Until we take over", the new authoritarians said to themselves

Writes Tom Woods in today’s newsletter:

What are the textbooks going to say?

That’s what I asked Scott Horton on the Tom Woods Show in our episode on the Durham Report [also here], which definitively exposed the “Russiagate” nonsense as the hoax any non-comatose person knew it was.

But here’s the problem.

American historians are reliable stenographers of the regime. They tell the story the way the Establishment wants it told. Can you imagine an American history textbook admitting that in their zeal to get Trump, entire agencies compromised themselves and major political figures fabricated bizarre stories of Russian collusion?

Historians — some of whom probably once believed the old leftist slogan “question authority” — dearly love the FBI, the CIA, all these agencies. A handful tell bad stories about them from the past, but those stories from the past evidently inspire zero skepticism about them among historians today.

“Question authority” was never meant to be taken seriously. It meant: undermine authority until we take over, and then use that authority to entrench ourselves via lies and dirty tricks.

Matt Taibbi has been on the left his whole life, and has no particular reason to want to exonerate Donald Trump. Except for one thing: he dislikes lies and liars.

Here’s Taibbi’s response to the report:

“I read Special Counsel John Durham’s ‘Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns’ yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s ‘Eight Key Takeaways’ summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.

“I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us ‘denialists’ — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.”

I myself hear the words “Russian disinformation” or “Russian asset” or “Russian talking points” and instantly think: I am speaking to a very low-IQ, highly suggestible person, who repeats whatever phrases are fed to him.

Time after time these fantasies of Russian conspiracies have proven false, and yet the story won’t go away.

Here’s hoping this time they’re slayed for good — heck, even Anderson Cooper admitted the report was “devastating” to the FBI.

Renowned Catholic philosopher warns Pope Francis is ‘destroying the foundations of faith and morals’

Dr. Josef Seifert rebuked the cardinals of the Church for failing ‘to proclaim those many truths of the faith that the Pope openly or tacitly contradicts by words and also deeds.’

Writes Andreas Wailzer:

A Catholic professor blasted Pope Francis, accusing the Pontiff of “destroying the foundations of faith and morals.”

Renowned philosophy professor and intimate friend of Pope John Paul II, Josef Seifert, published an open letter addressed to the cardinals of the Catholic Church, in which he called the bishops of the Church to resist Pope Francis’ his heterodox actions, like the signing of the Abu Dhabi document.

“Pope Francis – I say this with a bleeding heart – is not the ‘guarantor of the faith’, but is constantly increasingly destroying the foundations of faith and morals with this and many other statements and pronouncements,” Seifert wrote.

Continue reading here.