The Myth of Progress

[Harvey]

You don't play Russian roulette with things like that.

On the contrary. It appears Russian Roulette is the only game in town. Billions of people were just coerced into regularly injecting an experimental treatment proven to have no positive effect, produced, owned and propagandised for by the exact same group of people who speak of little else other than mass murder or (in their euphemistic jargon) depopulation.

[stickdog99]

Power generation should be as decentralized, efficient, and clean as possible, and food production should be as decentralized and as regenerative as possible.

But nobody in charge wants anything other than totally centralized power generation and food production with total control over power and food distribution. And sustainability is merely a convenient excuse for this. If you consider Digital IDs and currencies, ESG, and Net Zero in this light, it all starts to make perfect sense.

[DrEvil]

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You're in an echo chamber. There is no uniform consensus on 'climate change' despite your broad-brush and misleading attempts to present this false notion (CORRECTION: there is uniform consensus -- or the appearance of it -- within the dominant narrative echo chamber. Those within the chamber believe anything outside of it is sheer madness, or propaganda by the oil and gas lobbies, without exception; as such, other perspectives are never worthy of consideration. See: Covidians for another example of this mindset within another industry vertical).

Fuck's sake. That's like saying everyone with eyes is in an echo chamber because they all agree the sky is blue. It's not an echo chamber if everyone is in it. You're the one in an echo chamber, specifically the one created by the oil industry to preserve their profits.

And with each passing year the version of 'climate change' as depicted by the dominant narratives-- which you apparently fully accept with minimal/no discernable scrutiny -- are shown to be faulty, if not partly based on ulterior motives/agendas at the upper levels, with its share of grifters and greed-driven operators (not to mention the fact that the proposed solutions: electric cars, solar panels/wind farms are net detrimental to the environment and absolutely NOT scalable/sustainable, and of course the more recent push for ESG/social credit/climate-change inspired lockdowns are simply draconian and fraudulent).

Once again - I've been paying close attention to this for a couple of decades now. You're the one who suddenly decided to jump on the denier bandwagon and start spewing out every talking point cooked up by the oil industry ever. And you're making the same stupid argument over and over again: the alternatives are not 100% perfect, therefore they are bad. Are you even capable of grasping the concept of "less bad than..."?

More recently, as already mentioned in prior postings here and elsewhere, it appears 'climate change', or more specifically, 'imminent' climate change, is already being set up as another vehicle for, as Brainsturbator put it in a recent tweet, "...mission creep expansion of planetary technical surveillance and control constricting ever tighter around the biological breathing human. It doesn't matter who 'wins control' when the system itself has the teleology of dead machines."

Whatever you want to believe about 'climate change', it doesn't change the fact that it's being utilized as yet another means for imposing technocratic fascism.

Yes, but this is completely irrelevant to whether climate change is real or not. There can be a big problem and people trying to exploit that problem for their own gain at the same time. You're saying there isn't a big problem and that people are manufacturing it to exploit it for their own gain. That's my main sticking point: your denial of basic science. We're standing on the train tracks with a freight train barrelling down on us, and you're insisting it won't hit us. It will stop, or shift to another track, and we should all just chill out and stay on the tracks.

As mentioned in my prior postings, I'm all for oil & gas reduction, starting with multinationals/large-scale entities utilizing the lionshare of such energy (how much oil and gas do you think govt militaries exhaust each year? Or fucking NASA! Think that's going to be curbed anytime soon? Laughable), but any notion of getting to a 'net zero' anytime in our lifetimes, without the usage of nuclear energy (unless of course 'cold fusion' tech is being actively suppressed - ha), is delusional fantasy.

(Side-note: imagine being a fan of net zero AND also of NASA space missions, without a hint of irony!)

Once again you demonstrate your ability to not understand very basic concepts. Net zero doesn't mean no emissions. And what's with your obsession with NASA? Their emissions don't even register compared to the big spenders. Why not rail against the NRO instead? They're just as big, essentially a black ops NASA, and it's all for military purposes.

How the fuck are the wind farms, solar panels and electric batteries going to be mined and manufactured AND transported/shipped, at the scales proposed/advertised, without significant oil and gas usage?

Can't happen. Not as currently advertised.

So what you're saying is that monthly payments with interest is cheaper than paying the retail price up front? How the eff do you think we'll get that energy if it's not coming from renewable sources? We can have electric cars with batteries that come with a one time pollution cost (a cost that can be reduced over time through electrifying the infrastructure required to make them and by recycling them), or we can have fossil fueled cars that pollute every time you use them.

The whole point of using oil and gas for these things now is to create the infrastructure required to stop using oil and gas in the future. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than business as usual.

[DrEvil]

You don't play Russian roulette with things like that.

On the contrary. It appears Russian Roulette is the only game in town. Billions of people were just coerced into regularly injecting an experimental treatment proven to have no positive effect, produced, owned and propagandised for by the exact same group of people who speak of little else other than mass murder or (in their euphemistic jargon) depopulation.

Correction: we shouldn't be playing Russian roulette with the ecosystem, but you're right, we are. And Belligerent Savant is insisting it's better to keep doing that than try to change it, because change is scary and probably fascist.

[DrEvil]

Power generation should be as decentralized, efficient, and clean as possible, and food production should be as decentralized and as regenerative as possible.

But nobody in charge wants anything other than totally centralized power generation and food production with total control over power and food distribution. And sustainability is merely a convenient excuse for this. If you consider Digital IDs and currencies, ESG, and Net Zero in this light, it all starts to make perfect sense.

Agree 100% with the bolded part. Somewhat agree with the last part. There is a problem and we need to fix it. If we manage to fix it in a way that benefits everyone, great, but that's probably not happening because human nature fucking sucks and no solution is perfect, so we can either make the best of it or ignore the problem until we live in a system where it can be solved in a perfect way (which is never gonna happen). Personally I think ignoring the problem will lead to a worse outcome than any potential WEF bogeymen. Fascists can be shot in the head if they get out of line. Famine, war and systemic collapse, not so much.

[stickdog99]

175 years of scholarship down the drain in an instant

The intellectual and moral collapse of the academic left in the face of Pharma fascism is one of the more heartbreaking and troubling storylines in the pandemic.

I keep coming back to this story because it’s so astonishing and bewildering.

The academic left has spent:

Over 175 years studying capital — defining it and figuring out how it moves, grows, and shapes society (starting with Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845);

At least 80 years studying the origins of fascism (led by the Frankfurt School — German intellectuals who fled the Nazis including Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm);

50 years studying neoliberalism — the evolution and adaptation of capital to post-industrial societies (the foremost contemporary theorists of neoliberalism include Wendy Brown and Naomi Klein); and

45 years studying biopolitics — the ways in which state power manages and comes to dominate our biological existence (the term was coined by Michel Foucault, influenced by Jacques Derrida, and the current lineage holder is Judith Butler).

I have read widely across all four of these domains. Many of the foundational works in each of these areas are extraordinary. Million of hours of intellectual labor have gone into creating these four domains of knowledge. In every case they were developed either to solve an urgent problem in society or to act as a bulwark to prevent society from sliding backwards into barbarism. When the social science left in academia today (sociology, anthropology, political science, and now gender studies) talk about how society works, they are usually drawing from one or more of these domains.

The Covid debacle of the last three years is an extreme expression of all of these tendencies in society.

Capital captured the state, media, and science & medicine.

The U.S. military and bureaucratic state, seeking to justify their existence, developed and unleashed a weaponized gain-of-function virus.

The medical industrial complex withheld lifesaving medicines to create the trillion dollar market for a “vaccine”.

The so-called “vaccines” are genetically modified messenger RNA that penetrates the human cell and turns one’s own body into a factory to produce spike proteins.

The Fascist Pharma State requires that everyone in society submit to being injected with this GMO mRNA on a regular basis as a condition of employment, schooling, and participation in daily activities.

The harms from these injections are the worst disaster in the history of medicine and all of this is covered up by the Fascist Pharma State, it’s lackeys, and a culture built around iatrogenocide.

Any and all of these troubling developments should be in the wheelhouse of the academic social science left. Capital, the state, and culture are behaving exactly as one would expect — as described in the vast literature developed over the last 175 years.

What’s bewildering and beyond comprehension at this point (at least for me) is that the academic social science left, that has prepared for this moment for nearly two centuries, refuses to apply their own beloved theories to the quintessential examples of everything that they claim to care about.

Indeed, many of the loudest critics of capital, corporations, and the state became the point of the spear for the Pharma fascist takeover of society under the guise of Covid (Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Micah White, George Lakoff, and Slavoj Žižek to name a few, but really the instinct to take a dive at the worst time is dominant throughout this class).

This intellectual and moral black hole has also afflicted academic-adjacent bougie left institutions — The Atlantic Magazine, The New Yorker, Salon, Slate, the Huffington Post, the New Republic, the Nation, Mother Jones, Jacobin, NOW, NAACP, ACLU, AFL-CIO, etc.

Left academic-types who did not fall for this fascist nonsense and practiced the courage of their convictions by speaking out against the iatrogenocide are few and far between. I’m grateful for the work of CJ Hopkins, Naomi Wolf, Fabio Vighi, Giorgio Agamben, Mattias Desmet, and the extraordinary Mark Crispin Miller — but after that the list falls off precipitously. (If you can think of others please add them to the comments.)

The academic right has also been AWOL during this crisis for the most part (but I will leave it to others to call them out). The exception to this statement is the Brownstone Institute, a libertarian think tank that has done absolutely brilliant work throughout the pandemic and deserves our support.

...

It’s easy to be brave when the atrocity is in the past, or in a far off land, or so endemic that no one is likely to do anything about it anyway (hence the critique is not really a threat to the existing power structure). But when genuine evil came to the U.S. in the form of Pharma fascism — when the wolf of totalitarianism arrived at our door — the progressive guard dogs of society put their tails between their legs and looked for ways to ingratiate themselves with those who were clearly more powerful and ruthless than they are.

It’s not difficult to figure out the dangers of vaccines. You can learn enough to be conversant in the issue in an afternoon — if one approaches the issue with an open mind (a rarity these days). What’s really difficult is emotionally coming to grips with what this means — that government and corporations are actively engaged in genocide, that science and medicine are so corrupt that they are a net harm to society, and that our entire society is built around poisoning kids and draining the wealth out of their families to enrich the largest and most powerful industry in the world. What’s difficult about this issue is coming to grips with the existential terror that sinks in (and never leaves) when we see our society as it really is.

And so when we think about the role of scholarship (learning, knowledge production) in society — one more thing that we have to add to the study of capital, fascism, neoliberalism, and biopolitics is the fact that when the game is on the line and society desperately needs the tenured academic class to show courage and leadership — most of these people will collapse into cowardice, disappear, and/or develop Stockholm Syndrome. Literally nothing they have said or written before gives any indication of how they will behave in a crisis.

This is depressing af. It is also wonderfully clarifying. It tells us in no uncertain terms that elites will not save us (they will save themselves though). It tells us that scholarship is fine to a point, but not necessarily very helpful in a fight. It reminds us to look for courage in each other rather than so-called experts or leaders.

I’ve been publicly fighting in the war against the iatrogenocide for three and a half years. I can name 1,000 warrior mamas who have more courage and wisdom than the academic left knuckleheads who have been going on and on for decades about the dangers of fascism. I know for a fact that the size of the fight inside warrior moms and dads is larger than the size of the fight inside Pharma executives and their government lackeys.

So yeah, these are incredibly dark times. But we are learning what’s important and what’s good and true as a society. I believe that the current crisis will lead to a massive restructuring. Bourgeois institutions are collapsing because they are designed to reward the corrupt and cowardly. Instead, people are turning inward to listen to their own intuition, turning to each other in families and communities, and turning to warrior moms and dads — who have been right about everything from the beginning — for their wisdom and guidance.

I mourn the incredible loss of life that has resulted from Pharma’s capture of the state. But I look forward to living in a society built around the sanctity of individuals and families, that understands the difference between actual science and corporate junk science, where evil doers are held to account, and warrior moms and dads hold places of honor. Let us make it so.

[Harvey]

Excellant article, echoes the thoughts of many. If 'left' continue to refuse to acknowledge reality, then 'right' will continue to be in sole possession of any accurate information on Covid and all related issues in the entirety of MSM.

[Belligerent Savant]

Related musings -- from Horsley's Big Mother.