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I spent a long time in progressive spaces. I have written before about the forces that shape this kind of activism. Disorganized thinking has derailed many activist projects. Alinsky's title, "Rules for Radicals," is aimed squarely at the instinct of so many ardent young idealists to shoot themselves in the foot. "The left" has no central nervous function or immune system that says "defund cops is political poison" to protect the whole. People with no larger responsibility than "owning the man" don't think about third and fourth-order consequences of the visuals they create or the demands they make. This is how radical groups like the Weathermen eroded the liberal alliance created in the 1950s by the end of the 1970s. Those of us who are old enough to remember Reagan being elected, and what America was like at the time, understand the consequences of this spiral.

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Aug 4, 2022Liked by J.D. Haltigan

Excellent as always.

One might aver that the difficult personal integration that mature spirituality entails is difficult to recapitulate at the merely atomic individual level, as if the average person might suddenly discover within them the stoic truths of Marcus Aurelius... This of course rarely happens, though the human longing may be there for greatness more widely than cynics think.

There is an inborn grandiosity in us each which it is the task of adolescence and then adulthood to progressively overcome. The on-campus Marxist fusion of "the social is political" has inflated students right when they should be running into structures that might discipline their impulses and chthonian chaos. This is a deeply pernicious form of intellectual abuse.

A university that reviles both itself and the West -- having been inseminated deeply by the life-hating Marxist strain now predominating -- teaches students to explicitly reject structure in society per se and meaning in life per se, which is a dangerous cocktail of the purest nihilism.

This is what Paglia meant by "Happy are those times when religion is strong." The great challenge is how do we reintroduce a sense of the sacred and transcendent now that organized religion is gone? Most will not become philosopher kings...

While these are the deeper, grander questions, the immediate question of getting control of our governance and wresting control from the hard left is now preeminent.

The public is going to have to rapidly regain respect for law and order, disciplining wayward students (both in primary school and college), curtailing gender experiments with children, and a sort of awkward but just-doable painful discussion about how racial consciousness of a healthy sort does not entail the toxin now being poured down the throats of students of every color, but a different and more sophisticated rapprochement with an imperfect past must instead be made.

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Important article! I'll be talking about this in a video in the next few days.

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It's Cluster B and its associated effects all the way down, just like turtles.

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As someone who has spent more time staring at a computer screen than in bed and on a couch combined over the past thirty years, I see it as a threefold problem.

1:

People are flocking to the internet and social media not just for entertainment but socializing. Television provides a space where someone’s ideas regarding something had been restricted to people around them while watching. With every camera in every pocket able to upload, now they are the stars of their own reality TV shows able to vocalize their poorly thought-out ideas about a reality they barely comprehend. COVID lockdowns propelled this transition.

Social media has created new styles of communication that have both positive and negative effects on human behavior and society. On one hand, social media has empowered its citizens toward solidarity through collective action, such as raising awareness of social issues, organizing protests, and supporting causes. On the other hand, social media has also facilitated the spread of false information, sensationalized content, and polarized opinions that can undermine democracy, erode trust, and fuel conflict.

Social media has changed how we interact with each other and ourselves. While social media can help us stay connected with our friends and family across distances, it can also reduce our face-to-face time with our close relational partners and increase our feelings of loneliness and isolation. Social media can also affect our self-esteem, mental health, and well-being by exposing us to unrealistic standards of beauty, success, and happiness that can make us feel inadequate or dissatisfied with our lives.

2:

Education and indoctrination are two different ways of teaching that have different goals and methods. Education is the process of receiving knowledge, skills, habits, and theories using methods like teaching and discussion in formal and informal settings. Education is objective, meaning it does not favor one system of thought over another. Education encourages students to think critically and independently, to question what they learn, and to explore different perspectives.

Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, beliefs, and attitudes of certain philosophies. Indoctrination is subjective, meaning it elevates one system of thought over another. Indoctrination discourages students from thinking critically and independently, from questioning what they learn, and from exploring different perspectives. Indoctrination aims to make students accept a certain worldview without evidence or reasoning.

The difference between education and indoctrination is important because it affects how students develop their cognitive abilities, their values, and their identities. Education fosters intellectual growth, curiosity, creativity, diversity, and democracy. Indoctrination hinders intellectual growth, curiosity, creativity, diversity, and democracy. Education prepares students for a complex and changing world. Indoctrination prepares students for a rigid and dogmatic world.

3:

One of the challenges of using the internet as a source of information is to avoid internet bias. Internet bias refers to the tendency of some websites or platforms to present false logic or misleading information that confirms their own views or agendas. Internet bias is primarily due to politicization of Big Tech, Big social media, and Mass Media utilizing censorship, content editing, moderation, and cancel culture to mold opinions. Opinions get molded due to politics, personal recognition (Clout) social acceptance, and nefarious purposes by more intelligent actors using anti-racist virtue signals to propose racist results such as BLM, Woke, or Transgender while lacking any definition or redefining words.

Diversity for instance today is referred to as something without substance, of color not ethnicity, of gender not sex, of sexual preference as part of an identity which normally would have no business being in a civilized conversation. Diversity can mean hundreds of things and is what defines every person as an individual. Ideas, ethnicity, culture, geography, passions goals and more.

Through censorship a rational person meets lunacy with ridicule and the cancel culture comes to rescue the virtue signaling in a bipolar world of redecided and predetermined sides. Left Right Democrat Republican Straight Other lacking context of right and wrong with virtue signals over morality so there is no shame when there should be and anyone who shames someone that deserves it is singled out. Simply stating you are “Woke” if you are not Black (Using their vernacular instead of African American) is inherently racist because it’s cultural appropriation using an Ebonics term.

To avoid internet bias, one should always check the reliability and credibility of the sources they use. They should also look for evidence that supports or contradicts their claims. They should also be aware of their own biases and how they might influence their interpretation of information. By doing so they can ensure that they are not misled by false logic or misleading information on the internet. But due to problem number two with education most younger adults cannot do this.

Many people are being offered solutions to things that cannot be changed. For example, some claim that they can alter the weather or modify one's biological characteristics. However, these are futile attempts to fix what is not broken. One should accept the natural conditions of life, such as the weather, one's birth, sex, and ethnicity. These are immutable aspects of reality that no one can change.

To tactically dissolve the three-fold problem, pull from the bottom up. Start with 3, then 2, and eventually 1 will right itself as people are allowed to socialize without social media or move on to a new interactive platform such as the Metaverse. Which has its own problems to tackle later and if it maintains social environments such as social media spheres like VR-Chat should legally require a separation between age groups by generation for group socializing.

I spent a little more time writing this than intended, but it is a very important topic, and I hope someone of merit reads and utilizes this information.

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Yep. All this affect needs to be discharged somehow.

Most other nations have issues with their neighboring countries, i. e. external scape goats.

It feels like Americans need to continually persecute one another since they can't take it out on their neighbors (not much of a threat).

In short, young people need to have their own hero's journey (i.e. infusing their life with meaning) and this is how they do it these days.

What can I say, it looks like the perfect representation of the drama triangle in Transactional Analysis: victim - persecuter - rescuer, provoking one another into third degree psychological games.

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JD,

I repeatedly find myself returning to this article over and over again.

Now here’s a story for you:

A little over a month ago a woman cycling in a so-called “protected bike lane” in San Francisco took a video of herself acting utterly hysterical over an ambulance parked in the her path. Instead of simply going around the stopped vehicle she decided to make a video and share it online - naturally on Bird App.

The incident is covered here along with a transcript and link to the video itself.

https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/just-stop-killing-us

It turns out the individual had a history of using her social media presence to “stage” similar events including a somewhat fake arrest.

Despite her plea that car drivers were consistently endangering her life, it was revealed that she posted video from a few years ago of her driving her car.

This week activist media publication Streetsblog (see last article for a deep dive on their background) invited her to tell her story. Streetsblog, like many of the other examples of media “elevated” the pathological victim ignoring her past as a motorist who used her mobile phone to film video while driving.

In truth these organizations snuff out actual locals and experts in cycling safety. There’s a lot of grift opportunities out there in the greater “urbanist” domain. Wokism has also completely parasitized the traditional movements.

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2023/01/31/entitled-bike-lane-lady-speaks-out/

Streetsblog, like many “progressive” causes, claims they’re “for the people” (so long as they don’t drive cars) but are really backed by large non-profits and billionaires pushing Successor Ideology dogma.

https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/the-streetsblog-files-part-i-of

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Bruh...nailed it

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Consider the scenario that this is not a random occurrence, that the similarity to the social crisis of the late 1960s in the West is not a simple coincidence, and that very intelligent and malicious socialists have as a deliberate intention to undermine and destroy the social underpinnings of European and US culture. Consider a Marxist ideology that posits the creation of social chaos to achieve the conditions necessary for a violent socialist revolution. Imagine a "woke" Leninist vanguard who have been studying the errors of their last seditionist insurrection for the last few decades, and have decided to use the new opportunities provided by globalization and social media to make a new attempt.

Note that this new iteration is not about simple nihilism. The easiest method of determining this is to propose some antagonist attitude towards socialism in a supposedly unrelated discussion, such as for example how to proceed regarding trans acceptance and the proper role of new pronouns. My experience is that those who profess to be trans advocates become even more hostile and angry when socialism is challenged than when their propositions regarding the LGBTQIA+ community are questioned. One would expect a neutral or dismissive attitude from activists who are exclusively motivated by trans rights issues, but this is clearly not the case. Likewise the similar hostility to those who have chosen to detransition is most suspicious. The same hypersensitivity to any criticism of socialism applies to advocates of Critical Race Theory, and pundits like Ibram Kendi have openly linked the attack on "whiteness" to an attack on capitalism. Black critics of socialism are again not protected from the ire of such people.

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Great article but it would help if you didn't use the new favorite woke word "performative." It's vomit-inducing. Why not use "theatrical" or "contrived"?

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