“ In case you’re wondering, yes. I am characterizing almost 50 percent of the US voting population as Marxist or Marxist-sympathetic. “
THANK YOU , THANK YOU , THANK YOU Josh! I just wrote the same earlier today on a Twitter thread. I want SPECIFIC language. If we cannot name it , we cannot see it.
I’m currently reading The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil by Michael Malice. The beginning of the book highlights Ayn Rand’s damned near relentlessness calling out back in her day of the Marxists and adjacents.
Then there’s Mises who wasn’t even impressed with F.A. Hayek, et.al’s mostly open and free market economic views. One of his most famous moments was storming out of a meeting declaring the others as a “bunch of damned socialists.”
It’s lead me to draw parallels on how I was mislead into dismissing many arguments as falling for the “slippery slope” fallacy. Well it turns out a lot of slopes *are* quite slippery. Falling for this IMO is how a lot of this nonsense got in the door whether it things such as the Federal Reserve, damned near any woke issue, or this infiltration of Marxism.
While I say I was sympathetic to these politics, there was still a libertarian streak in me even when I was a leftie. It's an open question in my mind whether I might be/always-have-been temperamentally libertarian. Illegitimate authority has always infuriated me, as has being told what to do by anyone who is not in a legitimate position over me in a hierarchy.
I'll take orders from a boss or from a colleague who has superior knowledge or skills, gladly. It's much better to rely on superior judgment than it is to reflexively kick back at it. But this is mutually negotiated and recognized authority and voluntary hierarchies.
I knew the antismoking stuff was lies and hysteria 25 years ago. A legitimately unhealthy habit had been so demonized beyond reason; it was impossible not to take a lesson in how good propaganda mixes truth with hyperbole and lies.
I know I'm kind of an oddball, but when did so many "normal" Americans become such noodle spined ninny's that they will do anything to avoid being even a tiny bit offensive, determined to be pathologically nice and complete herd animals? I stay to myself, so human interaction isn't something with which I have to endure very often. Don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly civilized in public, friendly and polite. My state is fairly conservative, except for the city in which I live (and the reason I keep to myself), and for the most part spiteful mutants like I read about and see online are not in the majority.
Throughout the so-called pandemic I refused to wear a mask or do any of the other stupid stuff other people seemed willing and eager to do, but I never received ill-treatment as a result. I rather hoped someone would have the nerve to get in my face, so I'd have an opportunity to wither them with a response aimed so well they'd almost die from shock or embarrassment. Ha ha, most likely my real response would be to give them a cold stare, laugh at them and show them my back or walk by imperiously without a word. I always think of the killer comeback after the fact.
Truth is, I haven't felt one iota of sympathy or empathy for these frightened herd-animals. I resent that their unfounded fears impose on my freedoms, and actively scorn them, just short of wishing them ill.
I tune out the news and the blithering yammering scaremongering that comes from it. Even those I consider on my side (normal, conservative, reasonable, informed) do not ipso facto unduly influence me. I guess many people just defer their thinking to others, instead of taking the time and trouble to do it for themselves. Go-alonger’s-to-get-alongers are not my people.
I view you as a force for the Remnant. To illustrate what I mean...
From today's Fee Daily Newsletter:
"Alfred J. Nock (1875-1945), an American journalist, tells a story of the prophet Isaiah. In Nock’s colloquial rendition of the Biblical tale, God enlists Isaiah to preach to the people the errors in their ways and the divine wrath they will face if they don’t shape up.
“I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,” He(God) added, “that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”
Isaiah wondered: why bother, then?
“Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and buildup a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”
Nock clarified his distinction between “the masses” and “the Remnant.”
"The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. (…) The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either."
The moral of Nock’s story was that the masses cannot be expected to understand and uphold the principles of a just and free society, so it is futile to try to make those principles palatable to them. "Give it to them good and strong,” as the Lord instructed Isaiah, without any sugar to help the medicine go down. The Remnant—”He who has ears to hear”—will take heed and will be better and stronger for it. And when the chickens come home to roost, the Remnant will “come back and buildup a new society…”
It's remarkable isn't it? And many people are actively hostile to anyone who disagrees with them. The hypocrisy of the 'live and let live' crowd is anything but...their entire MO is absolutely about control.
I'm at the hardware store the other day, asking the young staffer behind the counter for the cost of an unpriced item. She refused to make eye contact and only muttered a mono-syllabic response as she handed it off to another staffer for scanning.
Around 21, she wore a cloth mask with little cartoon figures on it which was discolored by several stains as though she had been tugging at it for hours while munching Cheetos. She also sported a set of rubber gloves as she typed away at her register.
Are you afraid of catching Covid?
No eye-contact again.
A muffle, muffle, murble muffle.
You have nothing to worry about, I continued, feeling sorry for her at this point. That was so exaggerated.
Still no response. I noticed her belly protruding from beneath her little staffer vest in that Cheeto - not pregnant way. This girl was immense. Well on her way to metabolic syndrome and an early death and in a virtual panic over a virtually innocuous virus.
It appears that much of public life has entered into a state of hysteria. It’s as if the lockdowns cracked the veneer of our public conscience, unintentionally but inevitably revealing a thousand points of fracture and psychic pain. Fear seems to be both catalyst and response within this perpetual do loop. . . . I totally agree that scared people like the ones you describe immediately sense the lack of fear in others as a threat, perhaps because it is, to their psyche.
This piece reminds me of the podcast episode you did in the fall of 2022, where you commented on the victimhood movements ( there were clips of a professor, I can't remember who he is, describing that all victimhood movements eventually get hijacked by narcissists). It seems like so much fear mongering has a goal, the promoters of this WANT the entire population to see themselves as victims of the natural world. We are to fear the natural world, everything natural is the 'agressor', including our natural bodies, and therefore needs to be controlled and subdued. I'm just dimestore philosophizing here but IMO this is how the narcissists in all modern societal institutions want us to think. We're in a campaign of fear based brainwashing.
On the subject of the gas stoves killing people and the planet...
There's a new suggestion in the UK. For people like me who live in remote places and rely on kerosene heating, the government is suggesting replacing kerosene with hydrogenated vegetable oils. I guess this is because vegetable oils are "green" because they come from plants, unlike nasty fossil fuel stuff.
So...you take veg oil and add hydrogen. Where does the hydrogen come from?
2 options; one is obviously from oil. The second is most likely to be electrolysis of water. That takes electricity though, and guess how we make most of that?
So, we could just use the kerosene. Or we could use fossil fuels to make fertilizers and power tractors to grow seed oils, use more fossil fuels harvesting and processing them, use more fossil fuels moving them to a hydrogenation facility, where we would use more fossil fuels to obtain the hydrogen, that we'd have to use fossil fuel energy to add to the seed oil.
As a kerosene lamp collector and obsessive, including large lamps that are basically heaters that also give light, I'm just waiting for the US to go hysterical over these and try to ban kerosene.
You and I can form an army and hydrogenate those bureaucratic bastards instead.
Decommissioning a field that was likely previously used for actual food and replacing it with one that grows feedstock for bio-fuels. Energy-dense, long hydrocarbon, fuels (aka diesel) are the only ideal fuels that can power the machinery which prepares, plants, and harvest these fields, let alone perform the other processing techniques. Then they're using it to produce (checks notes) *vegetable oil?*
Or they could just keep on doing what sensible, normal people have done for ages - apply some heat to that crude oil and extract what comes out of the still at about 300 degrees C - kerosene.
Or let's just ditch using evil fossil fuels period and go back to killing whales. Since plastic is also evil too, lets go back to killing elephants for their ivory and sea turtles for their shells.
You live in a cold climate? To hell with synthetic fibers and materials. Let's re-open the animal fur trade. Beavers are annoying anyways but their fur is warm and fuzzy.
"It is fine to not know where stuff comes from, but it isn’t fine to not know where stuff comes from while dictating to the rest of us how the economy should be run." - Doomberg
I will admit, when the pandemic stuff first started, I was totally hooked into the fear. The lockdowns were exciting. I was a little offended by people who didn't share the fear, who pushed back against masks and lockdowns. Thank God I woke up from all of that. Now everything coming from the media just sounds like faked up narrative pushing the world into the Great Reset.
Individuals are too stupid to make decisions on their own therefore nefarious evil fossil fuel/pro car, etc took advantage of them forcing them to use planet killing and children-asthma causing natural gas.
Josh, you are a real gangster. How did conservatives become anti-establishment? Who knew liberals would become the face of authority and coercion?
Public safety seems to be the justification for all manner of intrusions by government these days, and fear-mongering its technique of choice. The sky is falling, officials say. We must prepare, experts warn.
Any number of federal and state agencies are prepared to step in and save us but very time the government acts to "protect" the public, the individual rights and liberty of the citizenry diminish.
I think you might enjoy Thomas Sowell’s book, ‘Intellectuals and Society’. He holds nothing back against the mindset (pride, hubris) of the so-called ‘vision of the anointed’ cadre of intellectuals who seem to act as though they were put on this earth to run people’s lives…
“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic” - Greta Thrunberg
BOOM!
“ In case you’re wondering, yes. I am characterizing almost 50 percent of the US voting population as Marxist or Marxist-sympathetic. “
THANK YOU , THANK YOU , THANK YOU Josh! I just wrote the same earlier today on a Twitter thread. I want SPECIFIC language. If we cannot name it , we cannot see it.
I’m currently reading The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil by Michael Malice. The beginning of the book highlights Ayn Rand’s damned near relentlessness calling out back in her day of the Marxists and adjacents.
Then there’s Mises who wasn’t even impressed with F.A. Hayek, et.al’s mostly open and free market economic views. One of his most famous moments was storming out of a meeting declaring the others as a “bunch of damned socialists.”
It’s lead me to draw parallels on how I was mislead into dismissing many arguments as falling for the “slippery slope” fallacy. Well it turns out a lot of slopes *are* quite slippery. Falling for this IMO is how a lot of this nonsense got in the door whether it things such as the Federal Reserve, damned near any woke issue, or this infiltration of Marxism.
You speak for me. Your experience was mine, too.
More on Mises.
https://open.substack.com/pub/bitstein/p/mises-the-original-toxic-maximalist?r=13n5g&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Tldr: be more Toxic! 😉
While I say I was sympathetic to these politics, there was still a libertarian streak in me even when I was a leftie. It's an open question in my mind whether I might be/always-have-been temperamentally libertarian. Illegitimate authority has always infuriated me, as has being told what to do by anyone who is not in a legitimate position over me in a hierarchy.
I'll take orders from a boss or from a colleague who has superior knowledge or skills, gladly. It's much better to rely on superior judgment than it is to reflexively kick back at it. But this is mutually negotiated and recognized authority and voluntary hierarchies.
I knew the antismoking stuff was lies and hysteria 25 years ago. A legitimately unhealthy habit had been so demonized beyond reason; it was impossible not to take a lesson in how good propaganda mixes truth with hyperbole and lies.
See the essay “The Most Dangerous Superstition” by Larken Rose. Starts on pg 161
https://odysee.com/@KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone:b/The-Voluntaryist-Handbook:f
I don’t think it’s by sheer coincidence that you’ve caught the eye of Angela McArdle, the Chair of the National LP.
https://twitter.com/angela4lncchair/status/1613670163475210240?s=46&t=DUl7g2S0MDUT1vrv8N6ENw
I know I'm kind of an oddball, but when did so many "normal" Americans become such noodle spined ninny's that they will do anything to avoid being even a tiny bit offensive, determined to be pathologically nice and complete herd animals? I stay to myself, so human interaction isn't something with which I have to endure very often. Don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly civilized in public, friendly and polite. My state is fairly conservative, except for the city in which I live (and the reason I keep to myself), and for the most part spiteful mutants like I read about and see online are not in the majority.
Throughout the so-called pandemic I refused to wear a mask or do any of the other stupid stuff other people seemed willing and eager to do, but I never received ill-treatment as a result. I rather hoped someone would have the nerve to get in my face, so I'd have an opportunity to wither them with a response aimed so well they'd almost die from shock or embarrassment. Ha ha, most likely my real response would be to give them a cold stare, laugh at them and show them my back or walk by imperiously without a word. I always think of the killer comeback after the fact.
Truth is, I haven't felt one iota of sympathy or empathy for these frightened herd-animals. I resent that their unfounded fears impose on my freedoms, and actively scorn them, just short of wishing them ill.
I tune out the news and the blithering yammering scaremongering that comes from it. Even those I consider on my side (normal, conservative, reasonable, informed) do not ipso facto unduly influence me. I guess many people just defer their thinking to others, instead of taking the time and trouble to do it for themselves. Go-alonger’s-to-get-alongers are not my people.
Yes. I stay home as much as possible. Having to interact with people even briefly is provocative to me these days.
I view you as a force for the Remnant. To illustrate what I mean...
From today's Fee Daily Newsletter:
"Alfred J. Nock (1875-1945), an American journalist, tells a story of the prophet Isaiah. In Nock’s colloquial rendition of the Biblical tale, God enlists Isaiah to preach to the people the errors in their ways and the divine wrath they will face if they don’t shape up.
“I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,” He(God) added, “that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”
Isaiah wondered: why bother, then?
“Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and buildup a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”
Nock clarified his distinction between “the masses” and “the Remnant.”
"The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. (…) The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either."
The moral of Nock’s story was that the masses cannot be expected to understand and uphold the principles of a just and free society, so it is futile to try to make those principles palatable to them. "Give it to them good and strong,” as the Lord instructed Isaiah, without any sugar to help the medicine go down. The Remnant—”He who has ears to hear”—will take heed and will be better and stronger for it. And when the chickens come home to roost, the Remnant will “come back and buildup a new society…”
Nock's "The Remnant", pun intended, nearly knocked me off my socks the first time I read it.
His essay, "Imposter Terms" is also really good being a great compliment to Orwell's writings about language manipulation.
http://savingcommunities.org/docs/nock.albert/imposterterms.html
You nailed it!
One thing I hadn't realized before covid is how many peolple want the state to be in loco parentis.
It's remarkable isn't it? And many people are actively hostile to anyone who disagrees with them. The hypocrisy of the 'live and let live' crowd is anything but...their entire MO is absolutely about control.
"The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe." -H.L Mencken
(With all do respect for the great Mencken, the verb in the second sentence these days should be "feel," not "be")
So true. Safety at any price.
I'm at the hardware store the other day, asking the young staffer behind the counter for the cost of an unpriced item. She refused to make eye contact and only muttered a mono-syllabic response as she handed it off to another staffer for scanning.
Around 21, she wore a cloth mask with little cartoon figures on it which was discolored by several stains as though she had been tugging at it for hours while munching Cheetos. She also sported a set of rubber gloves as she typed away at her register.
Are you afraid of catching Covid?
No eye-contact again.
A muffle, muffle, murble muffle.
You have nothing to worry about, I continued, feeling sorry for her at this point. That was so exaggerated.
Still no response. I noticed her belly protruding from beneath her little staffer vest in that Cheeto - not pregnant way. This girl was immense. Well on her way to metabolic syndrome and an early death and in a virtual panic over a virtually innocuous virus.
They're so utterly broken that sometimes it really feels to me like I'm not talking to another human organism.
I have this experience with this kind of person frequently.
It appears that much of public life has entered into a state of hysteria. It’s as if the lockdowns cracked the veneer of our public conscience, unintentionally but inevitably revealing a thousand points of fracture and psychic pain. Fear seems to be both catalyst and response within this perpetual do loop. . . . I totally agree that scared people like the ones you describe immediately sense the lack of fear in others as a threat, perhaps because it is, to their psyche.
This piece reminds me of the podcast episode you did in the fall of 2022, where you commented on the victimhood movements ( there were clips of a professor, I can't remember who he is, describing that all victimhood movements eventually get hijacked by narcissists). It seems like so much fear mongering has a goal, the promoters of this WANT the entire population to see themselves as victims of the natural world. We are to fear the natural world, everything natural is the 'agressor', including our natural bodies, and therefore needs to be controlled and subdued. I'm just dimestore philosophizing here but IMO this is how the narcissists in all modern societal institutions want us to think. We're in a campaign of fear based brainwashing.
On the subject of the gas stoves killing people and the planet...
There's a new suggestion in the UK. For people like me who live in remote places and rely on kerosene heating, the government is suggesting replacing kerosene with hydrogenated vegetable oils. I guess this is because vegetable oils are "green" because they come from plants, unlike nasty fossil fuel stuff.
So...you take veg oil and add hydrogen. Where does the hydrogen come from?
2 options; one is obviously from oil. The second is most likely to be electrolysis of water. That takes electricity though, and guess how we make most of that?
So, we could just use the kerosene. Or we could use fossil fuels to make fertilizers and power tractors to grow seed oils, use more fossil fuels harvesting and processing them, use more fossil fuels moving them to a hydrogenation facility, where we would use more fossil fuels to obtain the hydrogen, that we'd have to use fossil fuel energy to add to the seed oil.
Or we could just use the fucking kerosene.
As a kerosene lamp collector and obsessive, including large lamps that are basically heaters that also give light, I'm just waiting for the US to go hysterical over these and try to ban kerosene.
You and I can form an army and hydrogenate those bureaucratic bastards instead.
There are also moves afoot over here to ban people getting wood burners installed for heating.
These people can go to hell.
I am happy to send them there, and I can definitely figure out a way to do it that involves good old fashioned kerosene.
BANNING wood burners?? This is in the UK? Absolute bastards.
You want bad indoor air quality? OK. Go ahead and burn "green" vegetable oil. See how you like the soot and odor.
Decommissioning a field that was likely previously used for actual food and replacing it with one that grows feedstock for bio-fuels. Energy-dense, long hydrocarbon, fuels (aka diesel) are the only ideal fuels that can power the machinery which prepares, plants, and harvest these fields, let alone perform the other processing techniques. Then they're using it to produce (checks notes) *vegetable oil?*
Or they could just keep on doing what sensible, normal people have done for ages - apply some heat to that crude oil and extract what comes out of the still at about 300 degrees C - kerosene.
Or let's just ditch using evil fossil fuels period and go back to killing whales. Since plastic is also evil too, lets go back to killing elephants for their ivory and sea turtles for their shells.
You live in a cold climate? To hell with synthetic fibers and materials. Let's re-open the animal fur trade. Beavers are annoying anyways but their fur is warm and fuzzy.
"It is fine to not know where stuff comes from, but it isn’t fine to not know where stuff comes from while dictating to the rest of us how the economy should be run." - Doomberg
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/where-stuff-comes-from
I will admit, when the pandemic stuff first started, I was totally hooked into the fear. The lockdowns were exciting. I was a little offended by people who didn't share the fear, who pushed back against masks and lockdowns. Thank God I woke up from all of that. Now everything coming from the media just sounds like faked up narrative pushing the world into the Great Reset.
Just sat down after cooking an evil steak (medium-rare of course) over my dangerous gas stove only to come across this.
https://heated.world/p/this-is-all-the-gas-industrys-fault?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
“Their whole piece boils down to essentially:
Individuals are too stupid to make decisions on their own therefore nefarious evil fossil fuel/pro car, etc took advantage of them forcing them to use planet killing and children-asthma causing natural gas.
Only Noble Anointed folks can set them straight.”
A far greater threat to public health is the damage done to our immune system by the stress induced by this constant fear-mongering.
Exactly.
Josh, you are a real gangster. How did conservatives become anti-establishment? Who knew liberals would become the face of authority and coercion?
Public safety seems to be the justification for all manner of intrusions by government these days, and fear-mongering its technique of choice. The sky is falling, officials say. We must prepare, experts warn.
Any number of federal and state agencies are prepared to step in and save us but very time the government acts to "protect" the public, the individual rights and liberty of the citizenry diminish.
I think you might enjoy Thomas Sowell’s book, ‘Intellectuals and Society’. He holds nothing back against the mindset (pride, hubris) of the so-called ‘vision of the anointed’ cadre of intellectuals who seem to act as though they were put on this earth to run people’s lives…