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[Belligerent Savant]

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“We know they are lying; they know they are lying; they know we know they are lying; we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.” – Attributed to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

[Elvis]

A few from one of the most quotable writers of the last century:

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"The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process."


"The values of a society totally preoccupied with making money are not altogether reassuring."


"Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative."


"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."


"In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism."


"The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it."

—John Kenneth Galbraith

[MacCruiskeen]

"Thick people are very good at winning arguments, because they're too thick to realise they've lost."

-- Chris Morris (JAM, Episode 1)

[Harvey]

The problem Covidians have with misinformation is not that it's wrong but that it's heresy. And the problem believers have with heresy is that it's a challenge and an insult to doctrine. And no graver threat to the faith than correct misinformation. That leads to the stake.

https://twitter.com/JeffWellsRigInt/sta ... 2653874177

[Elvis]

"I contend that the methodology of orthodox economics is quite unable to explain the existence of money."

—Geoffrey Ingham

[hanshan]

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In line with the last 2 posts, quoting again from BNW, Revisited:

IV. Propaganda in a Democratic Society


In regard to propaganda the early advocates of uni­versal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democra­cies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distrac­tions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the per­formances, though frequent, were somewhat monoto­nous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertain­ment -- from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from con­certs to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop dis­traction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and polit­ical situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resem­ble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too con­tinuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by demo­cratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but some­where else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationaliza­tion -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationaliza­tion of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manip­ulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these tech­niques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrele­vance the rational propaganda essential to the mainten­ance of individual liberty and the survival of demo­cratic institutions.

https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

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[Belligerent Savant]

“I'm very concerned that our society is much more interested in information, than wonder; in noise, rather than silence. How do we encourage reflection? Oh my, this is a noisy world.” - Mister Fred Rogers, Go to the 2:23 mark of: https://youtu.be/djoyd46TVVc

[Harvey]

The problem Covidians have with misinformation is not that it's wrong but that it's heresy. And the problem believers have with heresy is that it's a challenge and an insult to doctrine. And no graver threat to the faith than correct misinformation. That leads to the stake.

https://twitter.com/JeffWellsRigInt/sta ... 2653874177