"If you get rid of the government, then the costs of violence are imposed directly upon the person who wants to use the violence." - "Intellectualism is a defence against inflicted falsehoods as a child." - "People get that morality has been used to control them as children, and as soon as they try to treat morality as morality and make it universal to their society as a whole, they're attacked as immoral, as uncaring, as brutish and wrong... It's crazy. People's brains are fried... they have been crippled, mentally." -- How many fingers, Winston?

"In an absence of principles all that guides you is immediate self-interest. That's the drugs, that's the sex, that's the divorce. Massive growth of the State. The National Debt. Without principles there's nothing to apologize for."

"The individual is pathologized so that society can be termed healthy." - '...a way forward for society that does not require the drugging of helpless children and badly informed adults.' - "What we call mental illness is injury to the brain that results from its repetitively incorrect usage."

'Protestor': "If it maximizes social justice..." -- Relativism. No Future.

'...when anyone claims a right, the first question to ask is what duties this right is supposed to impose on others; that will tell you what the right is supposed to be. It also provides a good test for whether there is, or should be, any such right. For it will often be clear that no one really has the implied duties, or that it would be preposterous to claim they should. Does your right to your opinion oblige me to agree with you? No, that would make the duty impossible to perform. For I too have a right to my opinion, which you must respect. If we disagree, I must change my opinion to yours and you must change yours to mine. But then we disagree again and must change our opinions again. And so on forever, never managing to do our impossible duty. If someone is interested in believing the truth, then he will not take the presentation of contrary evidence and argument as some kind of injury. He will not invoke an imaginary right that protects him against the revision of his opinions.'

'...this project is ideologically flawed... it is driven by precisely the kind of biased thinking and contempt for the public that the people behind the site believe motivates the major news outlets... they assume that all of the news is biased propaganda, but then all they do is replace the original content with skewed snarky propaganda of their own... At the root of this and many other art and technology projects is the idea of getting people to see things your way. It is deeply anti-social. It is at once an admission that convincing people through argument has failed, and also that the blame for the failure rests entirely on the public, not the speaker. -- ...these hackers aren’t interested in giving the reader a choice. That choice exists is the true radical idea. It takes what is implicit and unconscious and under the control of others and renders it conscious, explicit, and subject to our control. Taking the objects of media and government and making them subjects again.'

'It's all about striking a balance, really. I only wish there were more people out there as open-minded as I am.'

'...the subjectivist’s worst fear is social disapproval. There’s a pattern to what you face when making any objective statements of truth around a subjectivist. The first is that your statement is reduced to mere opinion... They’ll accept it as cool, quirky, or “interesting” for a while. Then, should you stand on any universal principal, they’ll become angry. They can never admit to being angry though (anger was not allowed), instead they’ll project that anger onto you and say that you’re the one who’s angry. They’ll say that (or act as if) you’re being aggressive, that you’re trying to be a controlling dictator who won’t allow anyone to believe what they want. The subjectivist has concluded that certainty or absolutism itself is the problem, rather than irrationality. They are quite absolute and certain that nothing is or should be absolute or certain. Though when you point out this performative contradiction all you’ll get is a seat shifting blank stare...'

"When you criticize people who just assert stuff, you expose the rage that is their violated true-self. This was a child who was attacked for being rational, who has not processed the agony of that, and as an adult, works to undermine the certainty of others in contradictory ways. People just make up anything to explain away their negative feelings. When people respond with subjectivity towards objective arguments it is because objective arguments make them anxious. This is what human beings do; it is what we are trained to do and it is desperately unhealthy. It leaves us crippled in the face of power. If you can't get angry, if you can't be objective, if you can't judge, if you can't stand on principle – then you are sheep. You are perfect fodder for whatever people with power want to do to you. That's exactly what they want; for you not to have access to objective principles other than this pseudo-principle that rejects all principles: subjectivity."

'"My whole life I've made a concerted effort to give people a fair shake and understand different points of view because I felt that everyone had something valuable to offer, but it turns out most of what they had to offer was complete bullshit." "Seriously," Richman added, "what have I gained from treating everyone's opinion with respect? Nothing. Absolutely nothing."' By his estimates, Richman's receptiveness has resulted in 160 irreplaceable hours of listening to grossly uninformed political opinions, 300 hours of carefully hearing out both sides of pointless arguments, and at least a month of listening to his parents' bullshit about how important it is to be open-minded.'

"People become relativists because they're raised by a crazed absolutist: somebody who is an absolutist but completely irrational like a fundamentalist Christian, or a Nationalist, or somebody who is culturally prejudiced in some fundamental way. They're crazy AND they're absolutist. And there's no possibility of overturning crazy absolutism [because an irrational absolutist can't rationally differentiate a true absolute from a false one], so the only room that the child can find in that kind of mental environment is to say everything is relative. You can't oppose the crazy absolutism with rational absolutism [because having denied rationality, an irrational absolutist can only resolve disputes using violence, and you're just a small child], so you just retreat into a general fog hoping to hide from the irrational dogmas raining down on you. Relativism is an emotional defence mechanism that results from the imposition of irrational absolutes like religion, culture, statism and so on."

You're trying to use the scientific method to invalidate the scientific method?? -- 'If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?' -- Only those verified by the scientific method. -- RELAVITISM: 'The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. [RHETORIC: Appeal to invented commonplace (pretend):] We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. [Proven by... the application of scientific method?] -- [TRUTH STATEMENT:] Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. [Including your 'idea', your truth statement?] When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. [via Evidence? Scientific method?]' -- Summary: Empirical junk data exists

'...I would still have the human decency NOT to try and publicly mitigate that guilt by conversion to shame because I know that if I succeed then it becomes okay for someone else. How I deal with guilt has an effect on how someone else will. -- What infuriates you is the idea that anyone or anything has control over us. You don't like to be told they aren't allowed to do something. "As long as it doesn't hurt anybody, I should be allowed..." You want complete freedom – which you will use to conform to very ordinary standards of living that you impose on yourself. ...the very thing that allows you to exist in a world of complete freedom are those internal controls and not the social controls – laws and shames – that you think bind you. Shame will never be enough – when your identity is "strong" enough nothing shames you... The laws will never be stronger than you. -- I am not trying to stop progress or technology, I'm telling you to be careful with your lives.'

'Buddhism: the doctrine that you are not allowed to protect yourself!' -- Turning the other cheek.

'...advertising isn't our window on society, it is society's window on individuals... It isn't about being white or being a guy, but about the class of people who have inherited the earth and then withdrawn from it, leaving it to entropy. Those people are the privileged middle aged – the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists In The History Of The World, and society hates you. Society is disgusted by all of you, even as you are disgusted by it. But look up at the ads, the ones who have to suffer for it are the next generation. The ones you suffocate with your physical presence. ...the larger point is that everyone around you feels your apathy, it senses that you are zombies going through life, you would much rather be elsewhere. Like on your phone. That withdrawal from reality has not gone unnoticed – not by your kids or your spouse... ...the problem is you. It is always you. And unless you change that thing first, everything else will be futile.'

'Relativism is not sanity, just wandering with the lost herd...' -- "There's no way to fight irrational certainty with relativism."

'It hurts to be wrong. Not just emotionally, but physically, especially when it’s public... The horror of it is almost cinematic. The more artificially pumped your ego, or the more brainwashed with academic pretension, the more terrifying that moment of realization is, that moment when all your assumptions are dashed aside like a three-year-old’s alphabet blocks. To a certain point, it is understandable why so many people live in such violent denial, however, this does not detract from the perils of that denial… Useful idiots talk, they don’t listen. They ask lots of questions, but never wait to hear your answers. For them, questions are not a search for information, but rather a method of antagonism. It is a way to keep everyone else on guard while making themselves feel superior. In this game, the useful idiot never has to expose his ignorance because he never has to enter into a meaningful dialogue with anyone who has an opposing view. All he has to do is attack, attack, attack.'

'In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin: "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges: "If many believe so, it is so." The argumentum ad populum is a red herring and genetic fallacy. It appeals on probabilistic terms... It is logically fallacious because the mere fact that a belief is widely-held is not necessarily a guarantee that the belief is correct; if the belief of any individual can be wrong, then the belief held by multiple persons can also be wrong. The argumentum ad populum can be a valid argument in inductive logic... However, it is unsuitable as an argument for deductive reasoning as proof... ad populum only proves that a belief is popular, not that it is true.'

'An individual demonstrating the false compromise fallacy implies that the positions being considered represent extremes of a continuum of opinions, and that such extremes are always wrong, and the middle ground is always correct. This is not always the case. Sometimes only X or Y is acceptable, with no middle ground possible. Additionally, the middle ground fallacy allows any position to be invalidated, even those that have been reached by previous applications of the same method; all one must do is present yet another, radically opposed position, and the middle-ground compromise will be forced closer to that position.'

'Eclecticism consists of selecting the good parts from a set of ideas and discarding the bad parts. But this process implies that you already know how to do the selecting, and have a standard of judgment to use for evaluating the ideas. If you in fact do, then there is no problem and eclecticism is a valid intellectual process. But if you approach a set of ideas in a state of ignorance then you are not intellectually equipped to pick and choose from among them. You could not know whether what you accepted is true or false. Herein lies the danger of eclecticism if you are going to pick and choose you must already have enough knowledge to do the selecting.'

(A God-fearing screed, yet still very useful.) -- 'Under Critical Theory/User Friendly Marxism, every tradition of Western life was to be redefined as ... "victims" or "oppressors." The stream of criticism was relentless and extremely sophisticated in an intellectual sense. Thus it mesmerized the pundit class who then disseminated the criticisms' fundamental content to the populace at large.' These intellectuals now control and administer our schools, media, courts, and legislatures. The cultural Marxists adopted Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values," in which the Mad Hatter's world is instituted: Everything that previously was an evil now becomes a virtue while all the old virtues become evils. Individualism, self-reliance, property, profit, family, marriage, fidelity to spouse, strength of will, personal honor, rising through merit -- all these integral pillars of our civilization become distinctive evils that oppress us as humans. They must be rooted out of our existence.'

On Critical Theory -- "The theory is to criticise: an unremitting destructive criticism..." -- 2/2: "Critical Theory actually attempted to politicize logic itself..."

Gisted -- There *is* a war between good and evil; like it or not, you *are* a participant in this war. You can't change the world with politics or sky-ghosts or arguments. If you want to change the world, be as happy as you can and you will become a source of wisdom for those who are seeking happiness. But if bad society can get you to be bitter and cynical and to turn against truth – then you become an effective advertisement of how truth is bad – as compared to the conformity to culture that makes bad society appear good. Reason = Virtue = Happiness. Bad society needs you to be unhappy, it needs you to follow a cultural script called, 'The truth-tellers are miserable and that's how we know they are not truth-tellers because a truth-teller is, by their own definition, happy.' Depression is to keep you despairing, doubting, depleted, inert, weakened, little, resentful, hostile, hopeless, joyless, mute, empty, and blind to the power that you actually posses: the power of the truth.

Gisted -- The first thing bad society will try is to get you to give up your love of the truth, to get you to become superior to, and cynical of, the truth. Then you inevitably become a relativist who is a cancer to anyone with certainty. If they can't kill your love of truth, they will kill your love of people because if you love the truth but hate people, you are no longer any danger, nobody will want to hear any truth you have to speak. Bad society will have successfully inoculated and alienated you with bitterness and hostility and cynicism. (But you can't hate people for their hatred of truth, because *you* are a person and you love the truth.) The basic equation of the value of philosophy is Reason = Virtue = Happiness. And so if bad society wishes to discredit you, all they have to do is make you unhappy and any truth you have, nobody will want – because nobody wants to be unhappy. If bad society can make you unhappy then bad society is happy. And that is why you are depressed.

Gisted -- We live in world of savage moral insanity – and nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone seems to want to just sail along spouting off 'moral' rules to bully and control children – but when those children come back with legitimate basic questions about the universality of those rules – parents, teachers, politicians and priests get all 'morally' offended because they really don't have any answers for basic questions and they get really angry because it the questioning reminds them of their own humiliation when they were punished or saw others being punished for asking questions. To challenge the ethics of society is to challenge most people's fundamental and foundational reality. And so bad society has developed a defense mechanism against people who ask questions called, STFU! – because if enough people ask basic questions, the whole fragile edifice of society will fall down. Depression is inflicted by bad society as a way to inoculate itself against truth-tellers.

On hidden metaphors: "The true self, the self of honesty, integrity, purity, honor and dignity – is like the soul in the Christian mythology, you cannot kill it off – it's always buried down there under the rubble of accumulated moral corruption and evil – and it still reaches out to try to help other people, to warn other people – and this stuff is all very obvious once you look for the signs about what people are actually trying to tell you..." -- On moral relativists: Moral relativism is simply a defense mechanism to obscure the moral nature of the true self. Moral absolutism is innate to our nature. Moral relativists feel bullied by their own sense of absolute morality that they have consistently violated, and so to manage their intense feelings of corruption, they project their innate moral absolutism into you – you become their bully – and they try to undermine your certainty and optimism about morality. Don't talk to these people; you have to shield yourself from their cynicism.

Gisted -- Why would anyone overcomplicate philosophy with this brain-bending Platonic world of forms? The reason is to destroy independent thought and enslave people – it's that simple and that evil. Why has this enormous chain of philosophers worked so hard to create this impenetrable and incomprehensible nonsense? Well, they are in the service of the slaughter house of power we call politics. If concepts trump reality and have no relation to sense evidence, then concepts can never be judged or reasoned about. If concepts can never be subjected to any rational analysis or any sensual evidence, then they have unlimited power. And so if there's something called 'the State', and the State has "virtue", and the fact that the State has "virtue" is subject to no empirical verification or rational analysis whatsoever, then the State is fundamentally unlimited in its power. And that's why those who are evil love these philosophers and that's why these philosophers get the veneration they do.

'The evolution toward a civilization increasingly dominated by technology and the power structure serving technology, the manifesto argues, cannot be reversed on its own, because "technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom," and because "while technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable." Because human beings must conform to the machine it has given rise to a social infrastructure dedicated to modifying behavior. -- From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture was not confined to Harvard—it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. [I]deologically inspired violence has become increasingly commonplace...'

'The Frankfurt School developed an approach to overthrowing Western Civilization so it could be replaced by Marxist thought. "Critical Theory" sought to destroy western culture by attacking every aspect of it and dividing everyone, setting them on each other so there is no unity. Big Government statists achieve consent by propaganda designed to anger their followers. They encourage everyone to be upset about whatever the successful are doing. They have to demonize whoever doesn’t follow their script. This is why you see so many corporations and rich people taking the progressive line. They don’t want to be turned into an enemy. [Progressives] train others to follow them. To be mindless minions marching to the beat of their drums. Their followers are all so angry because they’re constantly being told to hate the opposition. To fear them. To see them as evil and stupid, so you will never seek to understand them. There is nothing “liberal” about progressives. They are illiberal.'

Howard Rheingold: 'Collective action is not the same as collectivism. Collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist.' -- Larry Sanger: 'Epistemic collectivism is a real phenomenon; whether they admit it or not, a lot of people do place the views of the collective uppermost. People are epistemic collectivists in just the same way, and for just the same reasons, that they are abject conformists. Surely epistemic collectivism has its roots in the easy sophomoric embrace of relativism. If there is no objective truth, as so many of my old college students seemed to believe, then there is no way to make sense of the idea of expertise or of intellectual authority. Without a reality "out there," independent of us, that we can be right or wrong about, there is no way to justify placing some "experts" above the rest of us in terms of the reliability of their claims.'

'If a student at a British university starts believing that some radical form of Islam is ‘the Truth’, it is most likely as a result of this intellectual cowardice rather than the strength of conviction of some visiting preacher. It is the climate of non-debate, of listening and nodding along to everyone, that can make things seem like the Truth by default. This creation of a relativistic mishmash of equally valid views sells students short as surely as does the outright censorship of ‘extremists’: it, too, creates a climate of conformism and question-avoidance, where the extremists are allowed to speak but only because ‘everyone must be heard and treated with respect’. '

'The distinction between truth and a lie is a matter of predation: how will the author get what he or she needs? There is no interest in truth as an abstract idea, as a noble goal, as something integral to one's life or being. It is merely a rush, a kick of adrenaline, a way to get high and overcome a certain boredom. This chaos manifests in our world, too. All around us, words and actions do not match. Our leaders tell us one thing through their servants in the media, while the facts on the ground offer a widely contrasting counterpoint. The effects on society are the same as in a couple: the moral compass of people of conscience becomes disoriented. Individuals can no longer tell up from down, right from wrong, truth from falsehood. And after a certain time, they no longer care. They give up. They can no longer make sense of it all, so they turn it off.'

Comment: JoeTFriday: 'The slave master's dream: Convince the slaves that it is the intangibles like the master's smile and the preacher's promise that constitute the real values in life. Now the state will take over where the slave master left off after being so rudely interrupted by Enlightenment thought. Get used to postmodern subjectivism as the ruling paradigm. There's a world of intangible wealth out there for your enjoyment. The state will use the TANGIBLE goods in your best interest, thank you very much.' -- Reply comment: vidyo555: 'RIGHT ON'

'Nostalgic postmodernism is what people feel when they lose faith in institutionalized "practices" but are uncomfortable with their own creative spontaneity. There is no cure for postmodernism. It would be like curing enlightenment. You have seen the Wizard of Oz. You know he is neither a magician nor an evil culprit. What there is a cure for is your nostalgia.' -- *sigh* Soul-crushing relativism is soul-crushing.

'1983, Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology. He also explains in detail the goal of Soviet propaganda as total subversion of another country and the 4 step formula for achieving this goal: #DEMORALIZATION #DESTABILIZATION #CRISIS #NORMALIZATON'

'When the crappier bits of life are ­considered more real than the joyful bits, everyone is cheated. Happy people's happiness gets undermined and, tragically, sad people's sadness gets termed acceptable. The problem is that implying to people who have tough lives that those lives are more real or natural than those of people with an easier time is a tacit way of opting out of helping. "You may be struggling to make ends meet, getting punched by your partner and having racist abuse screamed at you, but at least your life's real." It's not a massive leap forward from, "You'll get your reward in heaven". Here's a suggestion. Why don't we use as our starting point the notion that people are generally a good thing, noble and willing to improve themselves and their communities, and find ways to help everyone do that.'

"An arrogant insouciance might, for example, seem more fitting to an age of imperialism than this wilting, debilitating malady; and enlightenment, another well-known theme of the era, might have been better served by a mood of questing impatience."

"It's this presuppositional thing that gets me. This is not the moment to be congratulating ourselves on the things we "get," the things we "share," ... This is a time we want to be a little less Mr. Smarty pants, and a little more Martian."