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Tag: truth
On Truth
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
The Western World’s concept of objective truth was challenged by Karl Marx, who declared truth to be class truth. The capitalists had their truth, and the workers had their truth. The workers’ truth had more validity, because they were oppressed, whereas the capitalists’ truth was self-serving.
This assault on objective truth did not succeed except on a limited basis for a short time in the Soviet Union where Lysenko damaged Soviet biology and agriculture at the expense of a number of lives.
Fragile And Unsustainable Lies
Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute,
Many times throughout history, policymakers have doubled down on their own mistakes, refusing to believe that they were wrong or hoping that somehow doing the wrong thing twice or thrice would somehow make things right. Then it all came crashing down at once and the rulers lost their minds, and sometimes their necks or heads.
Economic, governance, and social systems often rely on each other in ways not readily discerned by narrow technocrats. When one crumbles, the others fall in rapid succession while all the putative experts express surprise. Look at the way that the U.S.S.R, one of the world’s two “super” powers, fell apart in the late 1980s when it lost enough feathers from its peacock tail in Afghanistan that its lies about the superiority of its command economy became obvious even to its own systematically deluded subjects.
When NPR proved inadequate to prevent Americans from seeing the few feathers left in America’s peacock tail, as evidenced by the surprise victory of Trump and his MAGA messaging in 2016, mass media joined forces with various “progressive” elements to create a propaganda machine that puts the old clunky Soviet state media to shame.
BRUSH FIRES OF RESISTANCE
The gibberish spewed by the MSM propaganda outlets like CNN and MSNBC is mind numbing in its level of idiocy. They truly are the enemy of the people. The tweet below is a perfect example of the Big Lie. The current death count (with Covid, not from Covid) is about 200,000. And half of those were in nursing homes. The average age of death is 80, higher than the overall age of death.
THIS IS UNTRUE. So untrue that even the @cnn employee who originally made it up had to retract it. It is designed to terrify at the expense of truth. So why is @MSNBC presenting it as fact? @jack, please! https://t.co/LKd3J673cL
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) September 18, 2020
Anonymous Berkeley Professor Shreds BLM Injustice Narrative
An anonymous history professor at U.C. Berkeley has penned an open letter against the current narratives of racial injustice underpinning the BLM movement and ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd.
Its authenticity was confirmed by Kentucky State University Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wilfred Reilley, who says he was sent a copy of the letter along with Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell.
I can confirm that the letter in the thread below was sent to me and Tom Sowell. It's really worth reading, in a time of widespread panic. https://t.co/bknCdO39c3
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) June 12, 2020
Reprinted in its entirety below (emphasis ours) via @tracybeanz:
* * *
UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy
Dear profs X, Y, Z
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.
Continue reading “Anonymous Berkeley Professor Shreds BLM Injustice Narrative”
NICE RANT
This is powerful. As we said before, #rioting Mobs, #Antifa drones era, are looting, burning destroying working class and black neighborhoods. This great woman puts these feral hooligans in their place #GeorgeFloyd #NYC #NYCPROTESTS pic.twitter.com/jP02izNvfA
— Patrick Henningsen (@21WIRE) June 3, 2020
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
Ayn Rand
“The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.”
Ludwig von Mises
“Freedom and Property Rights are inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.”
George Washington
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
P. J. O’Rourke
NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE (PART TWO)
In Part One of this article I exposed the numerous false narratives being peddled to the masses, as this Fourth Turning is entering the intense phase headed towards an unknown climax.
I’ve been expecting the next shoe to fall in this Fourth Turning for years, but the financial elite have pulled the debt levers to keep the Ponzi scheme alive far longer than a reasonable person would expect. We are only six weeks into 2020 and it seems like a year’s worth of major events have already occurred. The year started with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.
For the next week the world was awash in rhetoric about World War III and possible revolution in Iran. Accusations of Trump using the Wag the Dog method to deflect the negative press from the impeachment hearings were rampant among the half of the country that despises Trump. Soleimani was lauded as a hero by the left and a terrorist by the right. Now, the entire episode seems like ancient history, as more interesting squirrels have arisen for the propaganda media to chase.
The entire month of January was occupied by the ongoing coup/impeachment against Donald Trump. Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi doing their best impression of the three stooges, conducted a laughable prosecution in the House, revealing this was nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid losing to Trump in a November landslide. The predictable trial in the Senate resulted in an acquittal and Trump’s popularity soaring to all-time highs, as independents realized the Democrats misused the power of impeachment for purely political purposes. Trump’s SOTU address infuriated Pelosi to such an extent it provoked her into acting like a petulant child, tearing up the speech. Future campaign ads wrote themselves.
NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE
“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
As we wander through the fog of history in the making, unsure who is lying and who is telling the truth, seemingly blind to what comes next, I look to previous Fourth Turnings for a map of what might materialize during the 2nd half of this current Fourth Turning. After a tumultuous, harrowing inception to this Crisis in 2008/2009, we have been told all is well and are in the midst of an eleven-year economic expansion, with the stock market hitting all-time highs.
History seemed to stop and we’ve been treading water for over a decade. Outwardly, the establishment has convinced the masses, through propaganda and money printing, the world has returned to normal and the future is bright. I haven’t bought into this provable falsehood. Looking back to the Great Depression, we can get some perspective on our current position historically.
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it. Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.”
Dr. Samuel Johnson
“Price discovery is not a sexy function of markets, but it is critical to the efficient allocation of scarce capital and resources, and to the preservation of the long term wealth of investors and the economy as a whole. If price discovery is compromised by manipulation, then we will all be gradually impoverished and the economy will be imbalanced and unstable.”
London Banker, Lies, Damn Lies and LIBOR
“The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but, there it is.”
Winston Churchill
“Then the kings of the earth, their nobles and their commanders, the rich, the powerful, and every one of their willing slaves and free men, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they cried to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne, and from the righteous anger of the Lamb.'”
Rev 6:15-16
Telling the Truth Has Become an Anti-American Act
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Stephen Cohen and I emphasize that the state of tension today between the United States and Russia is more dangerous than during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. For calling needed attention to the risk of nuclear war heightened by the current state of tension, both Cohen and I have been called “Russian dupes/agents” by PropOrNot, a website suspected of being funded by an element of the US military/security complex.
Continue reading “Telling the Truth Has Become an Anti-American Act”
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Søren Kierkegaard
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Hannah Arendt
“Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction, with other people usually paying the heft of the price. Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgment-impaired, and irrational.
Narcissists are liars, confabulators, and miserable failures, although some of them are geniuses at disguising the fact that they are, in fact, losers.”
Sam Vaknin
“And because of the increase in lawlessness, the love of most will grow cold.”
Matthew 24:12
Everyone Wants to Win and Nobody Likes Being Wrong
By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com
The axiomatic adages contained in the title of this article would be labeled as common sense by most Americans; especially Americans because, in the United States, everyone loves a winner. It’s also true no one ever wins by being wrong – unless in the instances of dumb luck or corruption and these never ensure long-lasting success.
Of course, the inverse of this article’s title would be: Everyone wants to be right and nobody likes to lose. And, particularly, in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. The shining city on a hill.
Such are the stories we tell ourselves.
Continue reading “Everyone Wants to Win and Nobody Likes Being Wrong”
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“He who does not shout the truth when he knows it makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.”
Charles Péguy
“Don’t let education interfere with your learning.”
Mark Twain
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
Joseph Goebbels
“Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.”
Henry Steele Commager
QUOTES OF THE DAY
“Truth and news are not the same thing.”
Katharine Graham
“The meek shall inherit the earth – a 6 foot plot above them.”
Robert A. Heinlein
“We don’t need no education. We dont need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers leave them kids alone.”
Pink Floyd
“Gun bans disarm victims, putting them at the mercy of murderers or terrorists who think nothing of breaking the gun laws.”
Michael Badnarik
The Truth Versus Your Truth
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
Who knew that these mid-cycle days of the long emergency (i.e. the collapse of techno-industrial economies) would feature the willful abandonment of reason by the thinking class of Western Civ, and America extra-specially? Reminder: the basic catalyst for collapse is over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns. The rest follows from there.
Another name for diminishing returns is blowback. The Internet is certainly the most complex assembly of human thought in human history and it is blowing back ferociously on humanity in ways that are far from obvious. It has set in motion countless recursive feedback loops of misinformation, disinformation, and ideas that are simply bad in the sense that they don’t comport with reality. Hence, the new elastic meaning of the concept known as “truth.”