Alon Mizrahi on the Israel bubble

I have lived most of my life in Israel.  And what I see is how destructive this is, how cruel and inhumane and how destructive it is and it has no future.  Part of me is trying to tell my former country, because I can't call it my country anymore, "You have to stop because what you are doing, you are bringing a catastrophe upon yourself.  You have to stop it before this catastrophe."  But no one seems to want to listen.  The conformity is so strong that no one dares break rank with the politically-approved message: "You have to kill children, you have to..."  We are looking at, I don't know, a huge historical disaster as it's happening and as it's about to get worse.

Israel is different because it is a bubble.  It is isolated basically from the rest of humanity.  And it is being shielded from its neighbors, from... humanity basically by the support of the U.S.  The U.S. is there to make sure Israel never faces consequences for what it's doing.  So Israel can be as belligerent and brazen and lawless as it wants because the U.S. will make sure nothing ever happens to it.  Which is an illusion, because something is going to happen to it eventually.  That's life.  

There's no isolation.  No one is isolated for long.  It can work for a short period of time, but no one is truly isolated.  We are all connected.

~ Alon Mizrahi, "Roger Waters Just Endorsed THIS Anti-Zionist Jew—Israel FREAKS OUT!," Kim Iverson, 12:15 mark, March 21, 2025

Bill Walton on conformity

When everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks. 

~ Bill Walton, Nothing But Net: Just Give Me the Ball and Get Out of the Way

1995

John Stuart Mill on conformity

That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

~ John Stuart Mill

Jonathan Haidt on cancel culture

I'm a big fan of the philosopher John Stuart Mill who said, "He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that."  That is, in order to really understand anything we have to look at multiple perspectives, we have to have different viewpoints pushing against each other.  That's what we do in universities.  And that's what we've always done in my career as a professor, until around 2014-2015.  All of a sudden, it became much more hazardous to question.

If you questioned, if you even tweeted about a study that challenged the received wisdom on race, gender, transgender - there are a couple of sacred issues - if you even suggested there was another side, huge social sanctions would rain down on you on Twitter and other platforms.  And here's the key thing: When people feel even a little bit of intimidation, when they think, "if I speak up, terrible things are going to happen to me of unknown size" (it could be nothing, it could be a thousand tweets).  It's that little bit of intimidation - that's what makes people go silent.  And when critics go silent, the group gets stupid.

~ Jonathan Haidt, social psychiatrist, NYU Stern School of Business, "'Uniquely Stupid:' Dissecting the Past Decade of American Life," Amanpour and Company, 4:40 mark, April 18, 2022

Mahatma Gandhi on standing against the crowd

It's easy to stand with the crowd; it takes courage to stand alone.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Erich Fromm on the dangers facing mankind

The danger of the past was that man became slaves.  The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

~ Erich Fromm

Doug Casey on speaking out and how H.L. Mencken avoided persecution during WWI and the Roosevelt years

If you believe in thinking for yourself, or if you believe in free minds and free markets, you’re in the minority.  You better be careful. 

H.L. Mencken, undoubtedly one of the greatest public intellectuals in American history and the best journalist in our history, is a cautionary example.  During World War I and throughout the Roosevelt years, he basically stopped writing or saying anything controversial because he might’ve been singled out and persecuted.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Dangers of the Growing “Snitch Culture” in the US," International Man, March 10, 2021

Bretigne Shaffer on the cult of mainstream America

Somehow, the culture that I live in has come to be characterized by an outright disdain for independent thought.  Public debate has been largely reduced to the pitting of competing authority figures against each other, and the capacity of most people to engage in reasoned argument begins and ends with an appeal to those authorities.  Only a very few seem able to engage directly with information themselves, and those few are largely ignored. 

We have arrived at a point in history where the intellectual norm is now to abandon one’s own capacity for reason and to put in its place a collection of authority figures and institutions. Or rather, authority itself.

We have arrived at a point in history where mainstream America looks very much like a cult.

~ Bretigne Shaffer, "Letter to my Grandchildren from Inside a Cult," LewRockwell.com, November 18, 2020

Boyd Cathey on the pressure on Fox News to conform

The pressure on Fox pundits and reporters to accept without too much grumbling a Biden administration will only grow, and like at other supposedly conservative news outlets (e.g., The Wall Street Journal), the new Millennial hires and writers, educated at Leftist hothouses called colleges, may well finally vanquish any dissent. 

The Neocons—the slightly more demure wing of Progressivism, broadcasting their message of liberal democratic globalism and post-Christian morality—dominate Fox and have paved the way for what is coming. They have successfully squelched Old Right traditionalist conservative voices, except occasionally on the Carlson program.

~ Boyd Cathey, "The Future of Fox News and the Future of America," My Corner by Boyd Cathey, November 15, 2020

Frederick Douglass on critical thinking and slavery

To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.

~ Frederick Douglass

Karen DeCoster Campbell: "Remove your damn masks"

Remove your damn masks. All you are doing is reinforcing the power of the politicians who are turning you into puppets. The mask enforcement racket is near-dead. Nearly everyone is tired of the whole scam: the constant assault of harrowing media headlines, the Covid numbers game ("cases and infections"), authoritarian politicians, and the ongoing mask bullshit almost eight months later.

~ Karen DeCoster Campbell, Facebook post, October 22, 2020

Rollo May on cowardice

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity. 

~ Rollo May, American psychiatrist

Kevin Duffy on diversity and Big Tech

The greatest long-term threat to Silicon Valley in general and the tech behemoths in particular may be the corrupting influence of egalitarian groupthink, all in the name of "diversity."

~ Kevin Duffy, The Coffee Can Portfolio, August 11, 2020

Eric Peters on coerced mask wearing

The Imposed Diaper is the visible symbol of the coerced submission of the thinking individual to an idea he finds foolish and absurd; it is no different than making an adult suck his thumb – or put his thumb in another place – as the price of being permitted to go out in public or go into a place of business. 

[...]

The absurdity of the thing carries with it a malevolent thing, which is the coerced pretending that it isn’t absurd. Which it obviously would be if people were left to to not Diaper because many who do think wouldn’t. This would increase the visibility of the absurd – and thereby make the absurd uncomfortable. 

Which might prompt them to think rather than feel. To conquer their fear, spread over the air with a virulence the virus has never even fractionally approached. 

Precisely what cannot be allowed to happen. 

By forcing all to Diaper, the fear is maintained by making it appear reasonable. After all, everyone looks afraid. Surely there must a be reason to be afraid. The effect on children and young adults must be especially severe – and damaging. 

The sight of the occasional Undiapered becomes a source of anger rather than a reproach. He is a danger – and it is true. A danger to the feelings of the fractured. The feeling that the fractured might look foolish.

That they’ve been had.

~ Eric Peters, "In Your Face," Eric Peters Autos, August 3, 2020

Bionic Mosquito on the destructive narratives of 2020

People live in and act on a narrative, not in an idea – and for sure not in the most obscure and hidden reaches of an idea.  If this isn’t obvious today – with the narrative of destruction and evil that turns ordinary men into sycophants demanding mask wearing and abnormal men into burning and looting everything in sight – then it will never be obvious.

~ Bionic Mosquito, "The Ideal of Humility," LewRockwell.com, July 2, 2020

Ludwig von Mises on how private property and the free market allows non-conformists to exist

In the political sphere, there is no means for an individual or a small group of individuals to disobey the will of the majority. But in the intellectual field private property makes rebellion possible. The rebel has to pay a price for his independence; there are in this universe no prizes that can be won without sacrifices. But if a man is willing to pay the price, he is free to deviate from the ruling orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy.

What would conditions have been in the socialist commonwealth for heretics like Kierkegaard, Schopenauer, Veblen, or Freud? For Monet, Courbet, Walt Whitman, Rilke, or Kafka? In all ages, pioneers of new ways of thinking and acting could work only because private property made contempt of the majority's ways possible. Only a few of these separatists were themselves economically independent enough to defy the government into the opinions of the majority. But they found in the climate of the free economy among the public people prepared to aid and support them. What would Marx have done without his patron, the manufacturer Friedrich Engels?

~ Ludwig von Mises, "The Rise of Capitalism," Liberty & Property

Leon Trotsky on what socialism means

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.  The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

~ Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, 1937

Ralph Waldo Emerson on conformity

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1940

H.L. Mencken on public education

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.  That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible.

~ H.L. Mencken

Jeff Berwick on the value of a college eduction

Universities for the most part today, are places where those who have been taught not to think for themselves go for four more years of training.

~ Jeff Berwick, editor, The Dollar Vigilante, July 18, 2016