Jeremy Hammond on ideology and the post-9/11 WMD lie

When I first started on the path that led me to doing journalism, it was after 9/11, and I was speaking out against the coming Iraq war, warning people how the government was lying about WMD.  My own parents and older brother refused to listen to me and supported the war effort, even though I was providing them with all the information I had so they could see the truth that there was no evidence Iraq still had WMD.  My brother at one point at least conceded that I’d refuted all the claims and that no credible evidence was publicly available, but then his argument became: "well, I’m sure the government has classified intelligence that Iraq really is a threat and just can’t publicly release it." 

For a long time, I just couldn’t understand it.  I just assumed that facts and logic matter to people.  But the truth is that beliefs often matter more, so that reason is suspended if necessary to maintain a belief system.  The idea that the government would lie to start a war was just so incompatible with their view of the government as “the greatest on Earth”, and even though there are bad actors within it, the system itself is fundamentally benevolent, a beacon of light shining democracy and freedom on the world.  It’s a belief system, a matter of faith.  The state religion.

~ Jeremy Hammond

 

Kevin Duffy on the nature of government, democracy and lying politicians

• Government is a heavily armed gang that terrorizes the people.
• Democracy is a scam to convince people otherwise.
• Politicians don't lie. Voters lie to themselves & politicians tell them what they want to hear.
• Voting shows tacit approval of the gang.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, May 21, 2024

Peggy Noonan on the great unifying myths of America

The children of the new immigrants will get most of their sense of what America is from general culture and the public schools.  It is there that we must give special attention to communicating the great unifying myths that define the dreams, characteristics and special history of America and that even to this day bind us together.  If we communicate the stories and celebrations that tell us who we are, then, in the year 2030 or ’40 or ’50, America will still be America.

~ Peggy Noonan, “What Americans Need to Know,” November 21, 1990

Søren Kierkegaard on the two ways to be fooled

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

George Carlin on government propaganda

I have certain rules I live by.  My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.

~ George Carlin

George Santayana on the distortions of history

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. 

~ George Santayana

Tweet on propaganda

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes journalism.

~ Lisa @freedomspeech50, tweet, June 29, 2021

Jeffrey Tucker: "Fauci is a performance artist"

Fauci is a performance artist who wakes up in the morning and tries to more than anything else figure out his media gigs.  He doesn't look at the science...  He knows his talking points and he clearly believes in the noble lie, as he himself admitted on the mask [issue].  And he's flip flopped on every issue from schools to PCR testing to travel restrictions to business closures and so on.  This man will say anything.  He is impressed with himself as a performance artist; that's what he is...  His main concern is "what am I supposed to say today to achieve my political goals and please my benefactors?"...  This is the most untrustworthy intellectual in the 21st century as far as I'm concerned.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "Fauci Slammed by Nobel Prize Winner with Jeffrey Tucker," OAN via YouTube, December 14, 2020

Thomas Carlyle on history

History is the distillation of rumour.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Schopenhauer on history

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Kevin Duffy on left media bias

What we have in this country is rampant ideological certitude, confirmation bias and knee-jerk rush to judgment. What we lack is objectivity, critical thinking and dedication to the truth, even if it doesn't comport with our belief systems. I may not know the truth, but I can tell you who's lying.

~ Kevin Duffy, Facebook post, September 14, 2020

Vasko Kohlmayer on the twilight zone of official narratives in the Soviet Union

The narrative of the twilight zone of my youth went roughly as follows: Socialism was the greatest socio-economic system ever devised while capitalism was very, very bad. The Soviet Union was a paradisiacal land of freedom, opportunity, prosperity and happiness. The United States, on the other hand, was a country of exploitation and oppression where most people were bound, destitute and miserable. This official narrative was constantly and relentlessly promulgated from every quarter of our twilight zone: television, radio, textbooks, arts, newspapers, magazines, etc. Needless to say, the narrative ran in complete contravention of reality. The actual truth was that socialism was no good. On the other hand, most people in the United States were free, quite prosperous and reasonably happy while the Soviet Union was pretty much an all-around hellhole.

Those who attempted to point out the truth or question the authorized storyline were promptly silenced, suppressed and punished. As a result of the swift and efficient censorship the false narrative prevailed and took a deep hold on the societal mind. And because it served as the paradigm for reality, it distorted and turned upside down almost every aspect of life: the good was bad and bad was good; white was black and black was white. The values and ethics in the twilight zone became inverted.

~ Vasko Kohlmayer, "Twilight Zone USA," LewRockwell.com, June 19, 2020

Andy Serwer on common thread underlying recent shocking news

The recent spate of shocking news—rioting in Minneapolis and cities across the country, 100,000-plus COVID-19 deaths, unprecedented tension with China and President Trump’s escalated ranting and bizarre-o battle with Twitter—may seem disparate and complex.

And yet underlying all of this is a single, simple thread. It is an obstruction of truth by those with a personal or political agenda. In a way then, all this news is really one story. It’s about how we’re being distracted from facts and real underlying issues. This clouding is what makes our complicated world that much more difficult to sort out and so too staking a middle ground.

~ Andy Serwer, "The common thread underlying the riots, Covid, China, Twitter and Trump," Yahoo Finance, May 30, 2020

Jeffrey Tucker on "ultimate groupthink" and "maniacal frenzy" over the coronavirus

After a full day of media interviews on the only issue that exists, I'm completely astonished at the amazing display of fake knowledge, fake models, fake cause-and-effect analysis, fake expertise, fake mental paradigms, fake timelines, and so on, that saturate media culture.

It's the ultimate groupthink, exactly like what imagined happened in the 12th century when mysterious happenings were going on and some soothsayer announced the answer, and everyone believed him, with horrific consequences, such as random pogroms and burnings.

What's remarkable is that the difference between then and now is that we have actual medical professionals, actual experts, actual people with credentials in respiratory infections, who might be consulted on these matters, but they sit now alone unconsulted. Even right now.

And this is entirely because an amazing perfect storm of media frenzy plus political opportunism combined to obliterate science, expertise, along with liberty and property, and all humane values, to give us the current-day absurdities.

All of which leads me to believe that when the dust from this collective fiasco settles, there will be a massive and universal sense of shock and outrage that such a maniacal frenzy could ever have occurred in a modern seemingly enlightened society.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, tweet, April 7, 2020

Mark Twain on fooling people

It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled.

~ Mark Twain

Bill Bonner on the crowd and the Big Lie

Crowds need lies, not truths; they are incapable of living with the infinite complexity, paradoxes, nuances, and gray areas of the truth.  Mobs belittle the truth to the point that it no longer resembles itself.

From the truth that stocks can rise for long periods of time came the lie that they will always do so.

From the truth that consumer spending can boost an economy became the lie that consumer spending is all an economy needs.

From the truth that consumer credit can boost consumer spending became the lie that credit can replace actual savings.

From the truth that the Fed can manipulate the economy in the short run became the truth that the Fed could control it over the long run.

From the truth that foreigners are generally willing to accept U.S. dollars in exchange for valuable goods and services came the lie that they must always do so.

And from the observation that the American economy - with its emphasis on debt, consumer spending, and stock market investing by the lumeninvestoriat - was a great success in the 1990s, came the fantasy that it represented the end of history.

Taken together, blended and simplified, these notions came to produce a sentiment that was completely at odds with the wisdom of previous generations and contrary to economic reality.

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day (2003), pp. 240-241

Bertrand Russell on confirmation bias

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious.  If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.  If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.  The origin of myths is explained in this way.

~ Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom

Voltaire on detachment from reality

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

~ Voltaire

Daniel Kahneman on the spreading falsehoods

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.  Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

~ Daniel Kahneman

Scott Peck on white lies

White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones.  A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely...  Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.

White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings."  Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial.  For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent...  Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries...  The result, then, is not protection but deprivation.  The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general...  Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage.

~ M. Scott Peck, M.D., The Road Less Traveled, "Withholding Truth," pp. 59-60