Thursday, December 11, 2014

Tyranny of Ignorance and Manipulation

How did it come to this?

People riot in the streets not because the police are murdering citizens in cold blood while "just doing their jobs" (with all the banality of evil that phrase is meant to conjure), but because they've been told - and they believed - this was all about racism. Oh by all means, let's have people at each other's throats: that way they will never notice the government boot choking them to death.

I saw an essay today, written by a John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute. commenting on both that and the Senate report about CIA torture. He says:
"We have relinquished control of our government to overlords who care nothing for our rights, our dignity or our humanity, and now we’re saddled with an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one."
He may as well be writing about Serbia under the "democratic progressives" (i.e. quislings of the Empire), but he's writing about a former republic still called the United States of America. A country that voted against a UN resolution condemning Nazism, and leads the "defensive alliance" (that has only ever waged wars of unprovoked aggression) now producing propaganda videos claiming there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Because they say so. Perhaps they need help looking?

How did it come to this?

A few years back, a columnist said this about the nature of political correctness, comparing it to Communist propaganda:
"...I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control." (source)
Think of this as you read the endless media promotion of manufactured scandal, from false rape stories to shrieks of outrage over a shirt worn by a scientist who just landed a probe on a comet. To hell with science, he sinned against political correctness! This cannot stand! 

As soon as the riled-up people begin thinking "Hey, wait a minute, this doesn't compute..." here comes another outrage, another assault on the amygdala, another crass emotional manipulation. The interval between the attacks is progressively shrinking, and soon may disappear altogether. 

How did it come to this?

Perhaps this gem, from Dmitri Orlov, will help you understand: "...there is a limit to how much you can know, but there is no limit at all to how much you don't know but think you do"!

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