This piece came to me in an unusual way. A British friend sent it, after his wife sent it to him. He said: “Well written piece! Pulled from Jean‘s friend on Facebook!”. All I really know is the author’s name is Janet Daley, and she’s in all likelihood British. I like how she points out the correlation between what the church allowed people to think and know and express in the Middle Ages+, and what we are allowed by government and media and industry to think and know and express today.
And then makes the link between the past 3 years of covid info, and climate change “science”. Going forward, you will find out how much Fauci declaring himself “The Science” has hurt the entire climate campaign. And maybe that’s not so bad. Let’s talk about these things. There doesn’t appear to be much sense in “saving the Planet” if the only way to do that is to kill your economy and society.
It would have been better is she had included the same “conglomerate”‘s control over the Ukraine issue, but we can’t have everything. Hey, I would include the Trump “RussiaRussiaRussia” campaign, but that might be a step too far for many. Maybe we need to explain this one step, one topic, at a time. For the Automatic Earth, it all has meant censorship, and lots of lost ad revenue, but also more readers, and their donations, because, luckily, there are still people left who, in Janet’s words: Argue. Question. Disagree. This light ain’t dying.
Janet Daley:
Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying
We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican. Scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions
As the year in which life officially returned to normal comes to an end, we must ask an uncomfortable question. What on earth just happened? We have lived through a period of what would once have been the unthinkable suspension of basic freedoms: interventions by the state into personal life that even most totalitarian governments would not have dared to impose. And we, along with most (not all) of the democratic societies of the West, accepted it. Before that era slips into the fog of convenient forgetfulness, it is absolutely imperative that we – the country as a whole – hold a thorough post hoc examination, because our governing classes have certainly learnt something they will remember.
The critical lesson that has been indelibly absorbed by people in power, and those who advise them, is that fear works. There is, it turns out, almost nothing that a population (even one as brave and insouciant as Britain’s) will not give up if they are systematically, relentlessly frightened.
The Covid phenomenon has provided an invaluable training session in public mind-control techniques: the formula was refined – with the assistance of sophisticated advertising and opinion-forming advice – to an astonishingly successful blend of mass anxiety (your life is in danger) and moral coercion (you are putting other people’s lives in danger). But it was not just the endless repetition of that message that accomplished the almost universal, and quite unexpected, compliance. It was the comprehensive suppression of dissent even when it came from expert sources – and the prohibition on argument even when it was accompanied by counter-evidence – that really did the trick. Now the prescription is readily available for any governing elite hoping to initiate a policy likely to meet with strong public resistance. First tell people that they, or their children and grandchildren, will die if they do not comply. Then prohibit any mitigating argument or critique of this prediction.
If the laws of the land do not permit you to stamp out all such deviant opinions, you can simply orchestrate an avalanche of opprobrium and disrepute on those who express them so that their professional reputations are undermined. But that is yesterday’s battle. Covid – as a historic event – is over. Let’s talk about how the Fear programme, now an accepted part of the armoury of democratic politics, is likely to work in the present and future. As it happens, there is what looks like a remarkably similar model of anxiety-plus-moral-blackmail being applied to the matter of climate change. Note: these observations have no bearing on whether or not there is a true “climate crisis”. What I want to consider is how the policies that are being formulated to address it are being framed.
We find ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict authority
Words are terribly important here. There seems to be an alarming similarity between the language in which the climate campaign is being conducted and the one used to sell the authoritarian Covid lockdowns. There is, for example, a curious anthropomorphising of the threat in both cases. The virus was depicted regularly by both politicians and their medical officials as a sentient adversary with an “agenda” (that word was, believe it or not, actually used) to destroy human lives. It was likened to a wartime enemy – except that it was more sinister because it was “invisible”. This was not strictly true, of course: it was an organism clearly visible under a microscope as was demonstrated repeatedly in scary images widely reproduced in the media. Now, the Planet (the word is usually capitalised as if it were a proper name) is being described as if it too was a conscious being whose innocent life was being threatened by the thoughtless rapaciousness of human beings. So we – and our inclinations – are once again the potential danger.
None of this nonsense has anything to do with science. It is the language of horror movies or particularly gruesome fairy tales designed to frighten children into good behaviour. The great offence that is being committed by these machinations, in fact, is against scientific endeavour itself, which relies on disagreement and open debate to progress. Somehow, we have found ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict the inviolable truth of authority. Who would have thought that, centuries after the Enlightenment, we would return to Galileo vs the Vatican? This is not intended to imply that religious belief is always the enemy of scientific rationality. I personally believe that human intelligence is the greatest of God’s gifts and that the traducing of it is truly sinful as well as utterly irresponsible. As it happened, there was one more affirmation of the irreplaceable importance of intellect and inventiveness just last week with the successful experiment in nuclear fusion, which may, literally, save the future of all those who inhabit the earth (if, in fact, it is genuinely in danger).
What intelligence and innovation rely on above all is criticism and disputation. That is the nature of the thing. It should be what education is for. We cannot, must not, stop fighting for the right to disagree. It is appalling that it has become necessary to legislate to enforce this freedom on academic institutions that were once dedicated to free discussion. The imperatives that must be taught to the young have not changed since Plato’s day. Argue. Question. Disagree. Expose received ideas to rigorous interrogation. Express doubt when you are unpersuaded. Seek truth through endless dialogue. Certainly some mistakes will be made in the name of liberty, but they can only be corrected if we do not, literally, lose our minds in the name of safety. The lines by Dylan Thomas, which were intended to be about physical death, could just as easily be applied to the death of Reason:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
We would have been quite better off if the government had been as lenient as the inquisition was on Galileo. The real parallel was that he was ratted out to the authorities by his fellow scientists – just as we were condemned by our fellow citizens.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
Hold on, Real Scientist and Patriots did rat out The CV-19 Shots lies (AIDS , cancer & prion genes; spike protein clots, toxins, heart damage, etc) from the beginning but the CDC which is an arm of Big Pharma, and Fauci, who was elevated to “Pope of Science” by TPTB own the Cat Bird Seat in Society. Yes your “Fellow Citizens” were the half of stupid American liberal Useful Idiots that were all over TV, that the ZOG own and run everything; and their prostitute Minions who are paid to lie, enforce injustices, and who accept every government lie; they Created the huge concentrated illegal Federal powers that were used to abuse and screw the minds of our liberal idiot peers. But about half of US knew better and like she said per se, it was TPTB who are responsible for the Clot Shot Genocide, who tell lies for Truth and censor the Truth; who are responsible for 10s of millions of Medical Murders. We should have killed them all with kitchen knives like Alexander Soljenitsen said.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Coupled with…
“Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying”
Please. A Stunning Revelation?
Keep Your Head. Down. Given the Opportunity/Asked?
‘Act Locally, Think Globally’
Sooner. Or Later. It WILL come to that. And THEN?
1 Thessalonians 4:16 “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:”
“Governments have learnt that fear works”
Government learned nothing they didn’t already know quite well, or that they haven’t used to great effect thousands of times before.
I also learned nothing I didn’t already know. I had re-corroborated that most of my fellow humans aren’t really human, but rather sheep.
Humanity failed the Gom Jabbar ….
….
Again.
They don’t ask themselves if the Galileo story is true or if Galileo even existed. Not there yet.
have you asked whether you exist?
That’s another tool. To make you believe you’re in the matrix, that you are not real.
i believe you’re on the right track, Guest:
“Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying”
I think that statement says it all, just worded a bit incorrectly. Probably should read something like, “More of the general populous than ever before has come to realize that Governments do in fact use fear to propagate an agenda. Although a terrifying truth, it should be viewed as a tool used to spark demand for a revolution. It should serve as a wake up call for everyone to think critically and question everything. Which is the basic foundation of science.”
Wow, what a stupid headline.
The author knows nothing about “Galileo vs the Vatican.”
Galileo was teaching that the Earth revolved around the Earth.
That isn’t what landed him being under house arrest.
That theory was being taught in the colleges at that time, it wasn’t a crime.
From:
Debunking the Galileo Myth
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/galileo/debunking-the-galileo-myth.html
By DINESH D’SOUZA
Galileo was neither charged nor convicted of heresy. He was charged with teaching heliocentrism in specific contravention of his own pledge not to do so. This is a charge on which Galileo was guilty. He had assured Cardinal Bellarmine that given the sensitivity of the issue, he would not publicly promote heliocentrism. Yet when a new pope was named, Galileo decided on his own to go back on his word. Asked about this in court, he said his Dialogue on the Two World Systems did not advocate heliocentrism. This is a flat-out untruth as anyone who reads Galileo’s book can plainly see. Even Galileo’s supporters, and there were many, found it difficult to defend him at this point.
=======
The author of this piece shows what an idiot he is.
Galileo vs the Vatican myth is fake and gay as everything else government school educated midwits incessantly virtue signal about. Now AE is faker and gay, too.
“Like Giordano Bruno and the Library of Alexandria, Galileo’s status as a secular saint and martyr rests almost entirely upon a false characterization of the historical events due to his utility in attacking the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity.”
The emergence of modern astronomy – a complex mosaic: Part XXVII
Galileo’s real crime was hubris, trying to play an absolutist ruler, the Pope, for a fool. Others were executed for less in the seventeenth century and not just by the Catholic Church. Galileo got off comparatively lightly.
And how is that different from today?
— Me: “Geologic science shows the earth to be billions of years old.”
— Bible Literalists: “Wrong! The BIBLE says the world was created abut 6,000 years ago, ya heathen bastard!!”
When science clashes with religion … religion always wins (for a certain group of people).
Everybody likes that Welshman’s (not so) rarebit, about rage & light. Me included.
Plea bargains, tho. What say the many bodies?
The blackhats know the beanie caps are wired to “pragmatically” accept the lesser of two evils – & call it a bargain (another pictogram of cogdis).
Where’d “all hat & no cattle originate,” I wonder?
Now that’s a picture: huge ~ really huge, like pre-Sherman “final solution,” trans con railroad, “manifest destiny,” all that jazz, bison herds once were ~ all wearing hats, as they stampede-impede progress.
Unless enormous buffalo jumps are considered progress. As all involved in “jump, the net will materialize” do so con•sider.
Galileo took the plea. Socrates took the plea. Lots of others, known & unknown, may have wished a plea bargain had been offered.
But “the system” “works,” pragmatically, because better by far pleas for thee … than me.
And because, there but for the grace of slick go I.
(So, head down, head down, head down … “rage, rage against the dying of the light” which apparently must be puddled around peoples’ feet).
Grace Slick & Paul Simon had a baby & they named that poor child Slip Slidin’ Away.
Or was that Adam & Eve? Because no way did the race to the bottom begin with Grace & Paul.
I am liking the worldwide flood cataclysm imprintation of ptsdefenestration … as an explanatory tidal power-arc of a divestiture.
Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be bathwater … falls, all too often, on waterlogged eardrums, when the mamas, & the papas too, all the way back, were born to be bathwater wild through blue yonder open – & even closed – windows.
If a stitch in time is good, imagine how good all the stitches attendant going thru plate glass are. Another pictogram of Bastiat’s Window, that.
Which has a lot more polished perception to it than ol’ Overton’s ever did, or will.
Hell, it’s right there in the name. Over(the sill & splat on the ground)ton.
And then plea bargain haggling about which window panes are acceptable to be plot-schemed (dis)coursed thru, & which aren’t.
(Spoken)
Yes, sir, there’s many a Kentucky coal miner that pretty nearly owes his soul to the company store. He gets so far in debt to the coal company he’s a-workin’ for that he goes on sometimes for years without bein’ paid one red cent in real, honest-to-goodness money. But he can always go to the company store and draw flickers or scrip. You know, that’s little brass coins that you can’t spend nowhere, only at the company store. So they add that against his account. And every day, he gets a little farther in debt. Sounds pretty bad, but even that’s got a brighter side to it
[Verse 1]
Now some people say a man’s made out of mud
But a poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood, skin and bones
A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong
[Chorus]
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
You get another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
[Verse 2]
Well, I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mines
Loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss a-hollered “Well, bless my soul!”
[Chorus]
Sixteen tons and what do you get?
You get another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
[Verse 3]
I was born one mornin’, it was drizzlin’ rain
Fightin’ and trouble is my middle name
I was raised in the bottoms by a mama hound
I’m mean as a dog, but I’m gentle as a lamb
[Chorus]
I load sixteen tons and what do you get?
You get another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
[Verse 4]
Well, if you see me comin’, you better step aside
A lotta men didn’t and a lotta men died
I got a fist of iron and a fist of steel
If the right one don’t get you, then the left one will
[Chorus]
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
You get another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
Sixteen (Over)Tons.
“Even that’s got a bighter side to it?”
No, it doesn’t.
That’s just another pyrrhic plea bargain. With the local empire-vampire.
And by local I mean *really* local. Like, enteric. Like, very dodgily endogenous. Like so inherently unalienable/inalienable that it cannot be extirpated, excised, or gamma radiated out, damn spot, out.
And those are mostly all just Faustian faucets ~ right out, or even through, the window ~ with the devil.
Negotiation? Nah. It’s negatiation.
It’s Negan, with his barbed wire-wrapped Louisville slugger.
This piece’s author writes “quite unexpected compliance…”.
Was it? Question reconnoiters which side of the rim of the window, or the bowl, a person’s on.
“quite” (Reconnoitering the Rim, episode 3, “Deadwood” – an important seasoned lumber bearing on the matter/antimatter crowd – which side is “brighter”?):
Words ain’t the point.
Comprehension of the real language ~ & the wholesale lifelong substitution of symbols for reality ~ is the point.
And the point is, was, will continue to be largely lost at sea no/hear no/speak no weevil despite fact the flour’s kinetic with squirm & the pancakes crunch when bitten into.
Wilson, the volleyball, with the bloody handprint face, floats away.
And when the flood comes, most of the Wilson volleyball factories float away, too.
But some Wilsons, so far, have always remained to repop/ululate goes the weasel & make planet earth safe for democracy, in whatever of its various names … which are words … which are symbols … which crash consciousness (of too many) like cymbals hammered & otherwise “weaponised” – sticks & stones ain’t diddly next to catchers mitts backstopping fastball words (it’s the mitts, ya romneys – not the fookin words).
Not exactly how it went (apparently), or was sailed – poetic license 007/extreme to make a point – but a not pure fiction, or symbology, either:
Speaking of “conductors” as the Simmons character does, this, from the Sailer review of Tar, is it, in a nutshell – or nuts sewn into thighs (a Weinstein wtf that I did not bother to look any further into):
“The conductor as elite culture hero emerged rather late in musical history. Conductor Daniel Barenboim admits, “Orchestra conducting as a full-time occupation is an invention—a sociological not an artistic one—of the 20th century.” Norman Lebrecht writes in The Maestro Myth, “The conductor exists because mankind demands a visible leader or, at the very least, an identifiable figurehead.””
If you’ve ever watched a conductor & thought, or said, wtf is the point? – you’re prolly alright. Definitely in better shape than them that never questioned, that just gots to have shiny bauble-objects of authority to focus on.
That’s “Sir” (can’t sing, or play) Mick Jagger’s function, too.
Prez-Play Joe Biden’s as well.
Straw bosses a-hollerin’ all … so’s company store cows & cigar store Indians can heed the black authoritay-socks call to throw the game per bookie o’ life, & flipside death, orders.
fuck, dude.
Start your own blog.
Just sayin’
Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying
“it was an organism clearly visible under a microscope…”
Sigh. NO.