Category Archives: Culture war

Nearly a Third of GenZ Favors ‘Government Surveillance Cameras in Every Household’

That's like, Totally Orwellian

Writes Tyler Durden:

Nearly one-third of Generation Z says they’d be just fine with government-installed surveillance cameras in every household under the guise of reducing domestic violence and other illegal activity.

“Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?” asks a new survey from the Cato Institute. Of the responses, 29% of those aged 18-29 said yes.

When it comes to other age brackets, 20% of millennials (between the ages of 30 and 44) also want everyone watched.

Then, wisdom appears to kick in – as just 6% of Americans aged 45 and older were OK with government surveillance in every home.

Broken down by politics, 19% of liberals and 18% of centrists agreed that our daily lives should be monitored by the government for our own safety, while 9 – 11% of those who identify as conservative, very conservative, or very liberal agreed in what appears to be a “horseshoe” issue that unites both ends of the political spectrum.

Continue reading here.

My interpretation: The government has, over generations, covertly and increasingly overtly taught people in schools that they should seek salvation in government. This is now the result.

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

>>>>>>

Update (24/06/2023): I heard a day or so ago that Youtube has taken the video down. Indeed it has been. No problem, see it here instead.

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Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

Far-left extremism linked to narcissism: study

From the “Postmillennial”:

A study out of the University of Bern in Switzerland has revealed that those who partake in far-left activism are more likely to exhibit narcissistic personality traits and psychopathic tendencies.

Researchers Alex Bertrams and Ann Krispenz found that many activists do not believe in what they purport to stand for, and are simply using the cause to prop up their own perceived moral superiority and social standing.

In an interview with PsyPost, Bertrams and Krispenz explain that narcissists are drawn to endorsing left-wing antihierarchical aggression via the dark-ego-vehicle principle, which arues that activism can be used “as a vehicle to satisfy their own ego-focused needs instead of actually aiming at social justice and equality.”

“In particular,” they argued, “certain forms of activism might provide them with opportunities for positive self-presentation and displays of moral superiority, to gain social status, to dominate others, and to engage in social conflicts and aggression to satisfy their need for thrill seeking.”

They made sure to note that, “involvement in (violent) political activism is not solely attributable to political orientation but rather to personality traits manifesting in individuals on the (radical) left and right of the political spectrum.” Essentially, narcissists tend to gravitate towards whichever side “seems to be more opportune to them given a specific situation.”

Bertrams and Krispenz lamented the fact that while there has been exhaustive research into right-wing authoritarianism, literature on their left-wing counterparts is lacking.

The pair have completed a number of studies on left-wing activism, including one which argued that those who took part in LGBTQ protests were more likely to exhibit pathological narcissism, which can be described as “an exaggerated sense of uniqueness, immodesty, and a desire for high praise by others.”

They pointed out that “exploitativeness (e.g., ‘I can make anyone believe anything I want them to’)” was a major draw, as it could give participants a feeling of superiority.

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”.