Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Frogs in a Boiling Pot

  It is understood that if you put a frog into tepid water and slowly raise the temperature to a boil, the frog will not leap out, but stay and die.  Another point about frogs, a large frog will eat a smaller frog; this practice is common amongst frogs, toads, salamanders, and other amphibians.  Considering the current political temperature, with the riots and other disturbances in the Western world, the political pot now seems to have been set to boil for quite some time now.

  People are not frogs and this is a main component of the current situation.  There has been for years now a systemic problem, sticking to the frog metaphor; people have been lied to with regards to what is going on around them.  People have suddenly taken notice that there are other people who want them to not know how to make good choices; be it by omission or by misdirection.

  It has been said: ‘the first man to hurl an insult rather than a stone started civilization.’  If that is true then when the people turn to riot, then discussion, including insults seem to have stopped.  It has also been said: ‘to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize’; and this statement should be taken as a warning where the warning is to see who seeks to hold back the facts in the name of providing a ‘truth’.  Words have been re-introduced into our lexicon with a bit of a wrapper; the two primary being tossed around these days are misinformation and disinformation.

  It should be noted that Stewart Brand, with his declaration: ‘Information wants to be free’ was right. While open to interpretation, the statement is slightly off the mark, in that it should be reframed as ‘Facts will become free.’  Some facts are not always pretty and when people learn of the facts, those same people are not happy; and yet the facts are still the facts.

   Below this point the conversation slash argument is going to get dicey or spicy.  It is of interest to this author to understand why so many people are willing to work off of a lack of facts and move forward from there.

   Of course there are times when feelings over facts can be beneficial, though there are a few caveats.  The ideal of Love is the best start for feelings to win over facts, so-long as one adheres to the non-aggression principle; else that be stalking.  Alternately, is the case of altruism, some people may be causing miss-directing when they use other people’s money in their acts of kindness.  Consider the phrase - ‘robbing from Peter to pay Paul’, please look up Corinthians 14:37 if you want to understand why this reference has been made.

   As far back as Plato and Aristotle it was known that a democracy would be a tyranny of those who held the most common of beliefs.  Plato strove to ‘fix’ this problem by setting forth the idea of a republic in his writings titled Republic.  Aristotle wrote a dissenting piece, mentioning that too many competing goals will cripple a government’s capability to function and that eventually only a tyrannical state will remain.  Aristotle made another criticism, this time against Plato’s assertion that the city-state was responsible for the poor and the children; thus making Aristotle a member of the Far-Right.

  Aristotle’s comment on tyranny was proven in reverse when the USSR collapsed and the country of Yugoslavia was broken into the Balkan states in 1992. The shift to what that area was to what is today was marred with intercultural conflict coupled with genocidal level killings and rape.  Previous situations happened in the same area when the Ottoman Empire extended its reach northward.  In 711 AD in the Iberian Peninsula was invaded and the concurred local citizens where allowed to keep practicing their religion, so long as they paid the jazya tax.  Sicily in 827 was taken over by one group until it was taken by another country in the 11th century; and then again in 1860 when Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army took the island back in the name of Italia; these shifts in cultural leadership plus the repeated oppression gave rise to the Mafia; which of course brought on a whole bundle of other problems both in Italy and further abroad.

  Post WW2, the League of Nations was rebranded into the United Nations due to failing at the mandate of world peace that was drafted after WW1; the League of Nations lasted only 26 years and was brought to an end after WW2.  The UN has been around for almost 80 years now, and while there has not been WW3, peace on Earth and good will towards all men still seems beyond the reach of the UN, which by the way seems to have mostly given up on those ideals in favour of authoritarianism; there was a recent attempt by the WHO to mandate that it controls the definition of what and when a pandemic is, and that control the mitigation process.

  There is a line of thinking that the world must be looked at holistically when it comes to topics like peace and poverty; this is impossible due to many factors.  On the peace topic, it will be quite difficult to get people harmonized enough, apathetic enough, or to be even disengaged enough in their own truths to create world peace.  Conquest of whatever was the ‘known world’ at the time has always been a fact for most religions, countries and many political ideologies; the Amish and a few others are excluded from the list. What the UN, the EUHC, NGOs and some governments have done was to download and off-load global warfare to locations in the Western World through their policies of mass migration.

  Moving on to poverty around the world, this can never be solved because the Earth does not provide a uniform or consistent condition.  Some countries have soil that is fertile and other countries do not, and some countries have navigable rivers while others do not; for example there is the Mississippi river and the Zambezi River with its Victoria Falls.  The two examples given shows how the world at the country level can never have an equal outcome because some countries can grow more food and ship goods to market at a lower cost.  The most referenced writing promoting equity of outcome for all was Carl Marx’s Manifesto; according to some though it has never been properly implemented.  Though, when one considers the recurring outcomes, one might assume the actual goal of hardcore Communists is simply a form of population control.

 The French, along with many others bought into the ideals of the UN, EU, WEF, and US that every state or country around the world will just get along, by holding hands, singing songs and that all people will just get along.  This line of thinking seems to have been somewhat accepted en masse in the Western world; while other people in other countries seem to have looked at the West as if it was a chicken ready for a plucking; the second group simply saw an opportunity made available to them, much like a common shopper clipping coupons.

   Unfortunately, diplomacy is not mankind’s natural state as the NEWS reports at the local, national, and global levels commonly and regularly.  Those in the collegiate and university institutions provide a plethora of courses in diplomacy and yet few and far between are the individuals who can attend such classes, and yet some political leaders have made the assumption that people in general can tackle such a task regardless of their educational level or any cultural differences. 

  Back to our Frogs and yes this includes the French, along with other Western countries that bought into the ‘all cultures are equally valid’ narrative; both linguistically and logically this quoted statement has a problem.  While it may seem like a nice idea, the slogan lacks specificity and not everyone agrees with it.  A culture is made up of more than just art, architecture, clothing, drink, food, language, laws, religion, or even the style of government; because every culture also comes with a common approach to life an idea of what is right general.  We as human beings look at the world in comparisons and that means that while two things may be ‘equally valid’, that doesn’t mean they are ‘equally best’; for the idea of ‘what is best’ is a matter of acceptable values, and values are the result of both one’s culture and one’s personality.

   

Mongol General: What is best in life? 
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.  (From Conan the Barbarian - 1982)


Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Killing Baby Hitler

 A moral quandary has being hanging around since the end of WWII.  Consider the following, ‘If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you?’  The answer when considered lightly is simply YES, as it is well known what baby Adolf will do.  The answer upon greater consideration unravels many threads for consideration.  The first of these threads, all of which are what-ifs of course is, someone even worse takes over; by changing the past one may invoke an even more disgusting future.  Another thread could be that by utilizing nudge theory young Adolf could be steered away from the mental state that caused him to adopt such a strong position on the Jewish problem. Yet another thread for consideration could be to kill Adolf’s father approximately nine months and two weeks before April 20, 1889 although he didn’t do anything wrong at the time.

 Robert Baden-Powell started The Boy Scouts in 1908 Britain with the intent of preparing young men to make ethical and moral choices moving forward in life, along with skills development; the entry age for The Scouts is 11 years old.  1922 Germany brought forth The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, where all Aryan children in Germany were to join at the age of 10.  The would-be assassin of Donald J. Trump was around 11 or 12 years old when Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower and declared his Presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015.

 All propaganda, including advertisement, contains common elements which should be looked for when consuming mass messaging.  These elements are named: Transfer, Plain Folks, Bandwagon, Testimonials, Card Stacking, Generalities, and Name Calling.  The reader is strongly encouraged to look up the definition of these terms as they are applied in the fields of propaganda and advertising; for example, the term ‘transfer’ is more commonly known as ‘association’.  The best propaganda and advertisement campaigns use a mixture of the elements in the right proportion, much like getting all the ratios right when baking a cake.

 Hilary Clinton, with her infamous “you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” catchphrase combined a number of propaganda elements.  The obvious elements are Transfer, Plain Folks, Bandwagon, Generalities, and Name Calling.  Breaking the statement down into its parts, one can see which propaganda elements are put forward. The use of Bandwagon comes out twice, with the terms ‘Trump supporters’ and ‘basket of’.  The element, Plain Folks, was craftily inserted by the call out phrase ‘half of’, besides being approximately one-quarter of American voters at the time, the use of this phrase caused those on the fence to ponder if they were deplorable or not.  Moving on to Generalities, Mrs. Clinton never did go on to explain why those Trump supporters were ‘deplorable’; thus allowing those receiving the message to fill in the details via their imaginations, a form of verbal lingerie if you think about it.  The final element put into play, Name Calling, is obviously a form of dehumanization or ‘othering’, by calling people deplorable; Clinton might as well have said ‘vermin’.  Now, remember that “you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” was one of the earliest messages that the then 12 year old would-be assassin heard about Trump.

 The celebrity Whoopi Goldberg went so far as to dead-name Donald Trump once he became the President of the United States; so it seems that becoming POTUS is now, depending on the person, comparable to the act of turning into Voldemort.  This could have been one of the ongoing messages that the would-be assassin heard about Trump; this could be an anecdotal point as not many males watch The View, regardless of age.

  Post the 2020 election, the vitriol got ratcheted up, with the Name Calling element being the weapon of choice.  A Bandwagon campaign aimed at Trump and those who support him was launched with labels such as Nazi, sexist, Fascist, racist, Putin’s puppet, dictator, tyrant, literally Hitler, insurrectionist, and the destroyer of their democracy.  The public got to hear from many of those in opposition to Donald J. Trump repeatedly state that Trump is ‘a threat to our democracy’; though that quote begs one to wonder if those opposed to Trump included that quarter of Americans in the deplorable basket, would be allowed to be equal participants in the electoral process to those who are not placed in the deplorable bandwagon.  This too would have been some of the messaging that the would-be assassin heard about Trump.

   All of this negative messaging that has been hurled at the general population about Trump must balkanize the people to varying degrees on both sides, with little chance for any middle ground outside of the tent of political apathy; the pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump debate is almost as heated as the “pineapple on pizza” fight.  Another consequence of the messaging above is that people are talking at each other rather then with each other; this has many people now to seemingly lose the ability to ask those on the other side the one simple question - “Why do you think that?”

  Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), a derogatory phrase created by those on the side of Trump against the other side, may also be applied to some people on Team Trump.  A quick glance at the pro-Trump side will reveal some people who hold in their head the ideal of “Orange man good” with as much zeal as those in the Progressive tent who constantly put forth the message of “Orange man bad”.  Few and far between in the history of mankind has there been a person who is 100% evil or good, and as such any purely myopic view of an individual should be considered irrational, if not outright cult like.  Speaking of cult like behaviour, at the very bottom of this writing is a line from Joe Biden’s election stepping-down letter where he puts his party before country.

  Donald J Trump is now seen as an existential threat by some due to the on going narrative, and those people are of course allowed the right to act in self defense and on July 13, 2024 at 6:11 p.m. EDT the world bore witness what ‘self defense’ looks like now.  The US election on the 5th November will be a day to remember for there seems to be a plot, and there will be no reason why these acts of treason should ever be forgot.

 

  From Joe Biden’s letter on his election step-down:

“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”