SUCCESSFUL LIES

The inestimable Roger Scruton nails the big lie spread around rather vociferously by our new main stream press corps:

It is testimony to the success of Communist propaganda that it has been able to persuade so many people that fascism and and communism are polar opposites and that there is a single scale of political ideology stretching from 'far left' to 'far right'. Thus while communism is on the far left, it is simply one further stage along a road that all intellectuals must go in order not to be contaminated by the true evil of our times, which is fascism.
It is perhaps easier for an English writer than it is for an Italian to see through that nonsense, and to perceive what it is designed to conceal: the deep structural similarity between communism and fascism, both as  a theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government.
Even if we accept the - highly fortuitous - identification of national Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is to betray the most superficial understanding of modern history. in truth there is an opposite of all the isms, and that is negotiated politics, without an 'ism' and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals.
Communism, like Fascism, involved the attempt to create a mass popular movement and a state bound together under the rule of a single party, in which there will be total cohesion around a common goal. It involved the elimination of opposition, by whatever means, and the replacement of ordered dispute between parties by clandestine 'discussion' within the single ruling elite. It involved taking control - in the name of the 'people' - of the means of communication and education and instilling a principle of command throughout the economy.
Both movements regarded law as optional and constitutional restraints as irrelevant - for both were essentially 'revolutionary', led from above by an iron discipline.

The fact that the press are authoring their own demise makes one think that they are either extremely illiterate about history, exceptionally stupid or that they believe that they will be the 'ruling class' in the new Marxist Utopia...if history is any lesson on that front they are in for a huge awakening.

WHEN 1984 ARRIVES EARLY

The Mueller hearings and the way the 'progressive media' is spinning the absolute disaster reminds me of the time I and some fellow believers went to a debate between Josh McDowell and Ahmad Deedat at Westridge stadium in Durban circa 1980/81. 

We prepared ourselves by promising each other to try and be as unbiased and objective as possible, and to acknowledge that if the other 'side' presented a logical and reasonable argument that challenged our view we would accept the most rational perspective regardless of how we might feel personally.

We needn't have worried.

Deedat was so incompetent and his polemic so irrational that McDowell ceased to argue and switched to presenting a more anecdotal perspective based on personal testimony, hoping to 'convict' rather than reason with Deedat, because the mans rantings were plainly incomprehensible. It was an embarrassment, satisfying for our worldview but cringe-worthy for the hapless opponent...or so we thought.

By Monday morning the Islamic propagation centre in Durban had copied and distributed hundreds (if not thousands) of cassette tapes of the 'debate' edited in such a way as to provide the Islamic 'scholar' Deedat with a significant win.

I knew this because Helenmary worked with a company whose many factory workers were 'crowing' about the 'decisive victory' achieved by Deedat. We were astonished. 

We were astonished at how diligent the propagation centre had been in working through what must have constituted a mountain of data as well as displaying a technological sleight-of-hand that was, for the time, impressive to say the least. 

But this experience also provided us with prima facie evidence of how technology in the hands of an ideologue can completely subvert truth. 

That knowledge provided me with what the brilliant social commentator Neil Postman called; a working 'crap detector'(CD) and it has been invaluable in viewing the world of news, opinions and gossip ever since. 

It is of particular efficacy in this post truth, Post Modern world where the bells and whistles of my CD are sounding loud and cacophonic (please forgive my word invention)

...or perhaps it is merely my tinnitus screaming!

SUBMIT OR ELSE!

Where have we heard that one before?

As small information sites on the internet capture more and more news cycles from the Main Stream Media (MSM) the MSM strike back.
Not with better reporting, or new deeply researched stories however, no...they strike back by 'exposing' these small operators to danger.
They threaten to expose these internet journalists with exposure of the home addresses, their family addresses their places of employment etc...why? So that the military arm of the left...ANTIFA (an ironically named product of the Orwellian imagination if ever there was one) are able to dox, threaten and abuse these small and largely defenseless outlets into submission or into hiding:

But, the rulers of legacy media think that they have a monopoly on truth. They believe they should decide who is a journalist and who is not. Citizen journalists are disdained by the legacy media from places like CNN, NBC, and MSNBC. Thus, the legacy media's response to the summit has been one of smears and ugly insults, even potentially dangerous doxxing. This is because the legacy media now understands that their influence over the American people is all but dead thanks to the internet. President Donald J. Trump's election, to colloquially put it, whacked the mainstream media upside the head. Now, they are taking vengeance on anybody who supports him.

MSM’s message is pretty clear: 'You’re thinking about making a pro-Trump meme? Think twice. Because CNN, DailyBeast, and Buzzfeed may plaster your face all over national media alongside descriptions like 'alt-right' etc.

To be clear, there are certain growing pains with this development -- fake viral news for instance. Some of the folks invited to the social media summit have actually promoted lies and falsehoods, but then again so have the traditional White House outlets represented by legacy media. Even in this case, internet transparency has increased the ability of the populace to call out viral fake news rather than depending on the mainstream media to admit their mistakes. Whatever the case and whatever the future holds, the legacy media is sending a clear message in order to cling to power-- if you partake in Drudge's dream, we will make your life a nightmare.  [Timothy Meads]

THE DISINFORMATION COMPLEX

Evan Sayets little book; The KinderGarden of Eden,(KGE)  explores the eccentricities and motivations behind the 'liberal left' that infests our modern culture. It is an enlightening and informative examination of what makes the modern left tick and as such is an invaluable resource for understanding the truly Machiavellian contortions that inform and instruct the lefts neo-Pravdian megaphone; the 'woke' media/entertainment/globalist disinformation complex.

This passage (one of many) deconstructs one of the largest lies that have been 'sown' into society by the Brobdingnagian liars of this complex:

Prior to the Modern Liberal era, the unrivaled success of Western Civilization was due to the healthy balance that was struck between the scientific and the extra-scientific, between craft and art, between the tangible and the imagination or, in my favourite locution, between Athens and Jerusalem.

This balance was not a s leftists portray it today, wherein science and the extra-scientific are mutually exclusive and wholly at odds with one another. Rather there was the recognition that both the scientific and the extra-scientific – both the cold, hard facts and the warmer human things like love, morality, decency, beauty, justice, and mercy were necessary for creating and maintaining a well functioning, happy, healthy, prosperous and progressing society.

In fact, in the Vatican – the supposed ground zero for religion’s war against science – there are, and have been, two spectacular murals of equal size and equal grandeur taking up the whole of opposing walls.

On one side are the great people and great moments from religious history, and on the other are the great people and the great moments form science. Far from Western religions ever being at war with science, they actually took great pride in how, time and again, science seemed to prove God’s majesty. [KGE, p.7]

JUSTICE AND CRIME

Theodore Dalrymple is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal,  a prolific author, a retired physician and psychiatrist who, most recently, practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Denis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, called Dalrymple the “Orwell of our time.”

Theodore Dalrymple on choice, crime and the importance of punishment:

One of the explanations of ill behaviour, if you like, is a kind of mechanical one. People have certain experiences and they react to them in a certain self-destructive way, as if their behaviour was that of a billiard ball being impacted by another billiard ball… [But] agency is extremely important. You don’t deny that things are more difficult for some people than for others, but if you deny the agency of people, then you begin to treat them as objects rather than as subjects.
There’s been a very strong current in British intellectual circles that criminality is akin to an illness, and therefore it’s wrong to treat it as something that people have any control over. And of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In England, the leniency of our criminal justice system - precisely, I think, because of our tendency to sociologise everything, to say that people are not agents… this actually promotes criminality… It’s as if criminals didn’t have thought processes like us, [as if] they’re completely different from people like us. But they’re not different from people like us, on the whole…

It’s very curious how people say that prison doesn’t work because a high proportion of prisoners when they come out commit offences again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere in a British publication that this might indicate that actually they should be in prison for longer. Another very obvious consideration, which is completely beyond the British intellectual class, is that the number of victims of crime is very much greater than the number of perpetrators. So each perpetrator actually creates large numbers of victims, and therefore it’s not kind to people who live in areas where there’s a lot of criminality not to deal properly with the criminals. We deal with criminality as if it is a benefit received by the poor, instead of what it is, one of the great hardships of being poor.
Mr Dalrymple’s views are somewhat at odds with those found in the pages of the Guardian, where readers are told with great certainty that burglary is “really quite inconsequential,” unworthy of punishment, and that anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation are somehow trivial, plebeian and unsophisticated. Such that expectations of lawfulness and justice - and not being preyed upon, repeatedly, with impunity - are airily dismissed as “idiotic attitudes.”

PAY CLOSE ATTENTION

The radical left are always harping on about 'supporting the poor', looking after the 'underprivileged' etc ad nauseum...i.e. virtue signalling....the thing is, when you take a good, hard look at what they actually DO for the poor and underprivileged it paints a very different scenario.

Close inspection reveals that instead of making things easier, they usually hurt the very people they claim to want to help:

"As for "hurting kids," AOC is on the record opposing all proposed legislative solutions to the border crisis. She voted against each bill put forward -- and as I just mentioned, was one of just four Democrats (along with her radical pals Omar and Tlaib) to break with Pelosi on the House bill whose Senate demise she's now cynically lamenting. She has encouraged boycotts and collective action against a private company fulfilling a government contractor's order to provide more beds to children she claims to want to help. Relatedly, she'd absolutely fume and fulminate over images of those same kids sleeping on floors, having agitated against beds for them. Will she also rail against the food service providers feeding these children? After all, they're also "complicit" under her twisted rationale." [G Benson]

For Ideologues like AOC and her band of supercilious sisters, the path to power is usually over the bodies of the less fortunate; just like their 'heroes' in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Venezuela.....need I go on?