Reason, Faith and Gnosticism as Epistemology - James Lindsay


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Reason, Faith and Gnosticism as Epistemology - James Lindsay

These days, James Lindsay has been blowing my socks off with one hand tied behind his back.

I thought to myself that to share this in the best manner, I should just put up a bunch of his videos and see who bites.

But this particular topic is so pertinent to Objectivism, it has to be a separate discussion.

Let's start with one video. Don't worry, there will be more.

In the video below, James spoke at a religious event staged by Sovereign Nations.

He talks about reality a lot in this lecture. What's more, he is an atheist talking at a Christian event and they love him.

I have written about this in my Journal since these ideas will inform my fiction writing to a large degree.

I am tempted to copy-paste those entries, but nah. I'm becoming a writer for real, so I will write. :) 

 

Let's start with a brief summary of this frame of epistemology.

There are three methods of thinking James deals with, reason, faith and a blend of gnostic and hermetic approaches.

That might sound too abstract to be interesting, but the entire epistemological foundation of things like the jab fiasco, the WEF, the Ukraine war, the theft of elections, the woke culture, and so on are defined by these foundations. People accept these absurdities because of some sleight-of-mind monkey-business going on. This crap works.

What's more, James gives details galore. But I will let him give them to you. I am in the airplane looking down right now.

 

James, like Rand, holds that knowledge of reality comes from sensory input and processed by the brain. This is called reason. James also believes faith deals with reality, but not all faith. The kind he discusses deals with the part of reality that is impossible (or hard) for humans to grasp through reason. I won't go into that here, but he gives a cogent argument, especially how faith keeps people reminded that humans don't create reality, that reality creates humans. Because without that humility, humans do very bad things.

The main point at this stage is to note that both reason and faith are open to correction and change as time and learning go on. But reality is not. It is steadfast. Another way of saying this is that reality is absolute whereas reason and faith are subject to change--in order to conform to reality.

There's a third kind of epistemology that goes back to ancient times. It is a gnostic and hermetic approach to the world. James shows it by citing a bunch of books from ancient times to more modern. (Believe it or not, the work of Karl Marx is pure gnostic and hermetic crap.)

The hallmark of the gnostic and hermetic approach is that enlightened humans already know the good and proper, they don't have to learn it, but they may have to "remember" it. And they have superior knowledge over the rest of mankind. Further, their job is to destroy the reality referred to by reason and faith, and create a new reality based on this enlightenment. Another way of saying this is that their ideas are absolute and reality is malleable--in order to conform to their ideas.

Since reality in itself does not cooperate with this self-aggrandized view, these people seek power in order to make reality cooperate. And when that does not work, the killing starts and the corpses of innocents pile up. 

 

I think James is onto something. This is the first time in a long time something made sense to me at this level. When Rand talked about faith, she lumped all faith into one mode and it had the flavor of the gnostic and hermetic epistemology.

Without taking anything from her deep insights, this was a mistake. I know in me, this has caused a lot of cognitive dissonance. I've seen too many good things come from the Judeo-Christian culture to condemn it as evil or nonsense. But I have seen religious people do evil and foolish things, too.

Now I know why the different outcomes exist. It has to do with what is absolute to a person, reality or the idea about it.

I'm not going to make James's arguments in this first post. Let's just say he is on track with Rand a lot more than it seems. Just look at how he treats reality.

So get familiar with these ideas through the video because there is a lot to talk about.

I will be making more posts and putting up more videos and other material as we go along.

This one is a biggie. (Even bigger than Trump, and you know what it takes for me to say that. :) )

 

Most of all, enjoy. James talks a lot about Hegel and snoozer stuff, but for some damn reason, when he does, it's not boring. It's interesting. Exciting. Well... James can get bit boring when he goes on too long, but the ideas he talks about are not.

:) 

Michael

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Great opener to the topic. Thanks, Michael.

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Yes great opener, and the serendipity of the webs still gets me. I was literally trying to remember who I was listening to the other day that had such a beef with gnostic thought and as soon as I saw this post it hit me Lindsey! ,so thanks for that :) .

It wasn't this video I was trying to remember , though it is in my queue. The conversation I was trying to recall was on Benjamin Boyce's podcast when he had Lindsey and Carl Benjamin ( Sargon of Akkad) on discussing liberal democracies and the west and such. I remember James' comments and sensing his vehement disdain for all things 'gnostic' and what struck me was I had a fleeting impression of gnosticism as a benign ancient philo that focused on the duality between good/evil ie dark/light. It occurred to me that I didn't have a very good understanding of gnosticism in general and especially ignorant of any epistemological considerations on its fundamentals, but hearing Lindsey rail against it I figured I'd have to look into more than just somehow having a book on the shelf with a William Blake engraving of a bearded dude and a mason's square ( which looked at one point to be a cool tattoo subject) lol

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Before I continue with James Lindsay, I found an excellent video that shows the experience of a person who has faith that God exists without all the secondary issues.

It's a video by Anthony Magnabosco in his YouTube channel which is devoted to something called Street Epistemology.

 

Before going to the video, some background information. James Lindsay shot to prominence by co-writing peer reviewed scientific articles of social study gibberish using post-modern jargon. After the articles were published, these things inevitably got exposed. And the world learned that this gibberish was not only published by science journals, it was reviewed by accredited scientists in the realm before being approved. 

Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose were his partners in crime. You can read about the beginning of it all here: Grievance studies affair.

Over time, Peter came up with the term "Street Epistemology." The purpose is to figure out how to communicate with closed-minded people using the Socratic method of asking them questions.

 

One guy, Anthony Magnabosco, turned this into a YouTube project where he asks strangers about their belief in God and, essentially, tries to lead them out of it.

He met his match with the lady below, not because she argued better than he did. She merely mentioned that his methods of reasoning are irrelevant to her connection to God. What's worse (for him) is that she made an effort to examine his questions and answer them as honestly as she could. 

I suggest watching the entire exchange. it is fascinating.

 

A passage that shows clearly how some people believe in God from their best thinking and faith is at about 31:06. Anthony had asked Valentina about the top 10 experiences that led her to believe God exists, but told her they did not need to talk about the specifics of those experiences. They were personal. And here is what happened. 

Quote

ANTHONY: If all these experiences that you were sure was the God...

VALENTINA: Uhm...

ANTHONY: It sounds like that's what's bringing you up to the hundred percent, is your personal experiences. I think. Right?

VALENTINA: Okay... Okay...

ANTHONY: Tell me if that's not the case... 

VALENTINA: I'll let you finish the statement or question.

ANTHONY: If we chug through all those ten and you came to realize that: I can't really be sure that that was this God that did those things. 

VALENTINA: Mmh hmm...

ANTHONY: What would happen to your 100%? 

VALENTINA: It wouldn't change. 

ANTHONY: It wouldn't change? 

VALENTINA: I don't think so.

ANTHONY: What on earth is keeping you at a hundred percent if it isn't your experiences? 

VALENTINA: My connection to God. (laughs)

ANTHONY: I got to write that one down. 

VALENTINA: Sure.

ANTHONY: Can we explore the connection? 

VALENTINA: How? I don't want to go into the 10 experiences. Yeah....

ANTHONY: No, no. Well, I don't think we need to.

VALENTINA: Oh, OK.

ANTHONY: Because I think what you were saying is, if we took your top ten experiences, you wouldn't fluctuate at all from the hundred percent. 

VALENTINA: I don't think so. Not anymore. No.

ANTHONY: OK. So you're kind of blowing my mind here. What would sever the connection? What is constituting the connection to God? What is the connection to God? I'm not quite sure I'm following. 

VALENTINA: Well nothing could sever the connection to God for me at this point. I just feel very strong in my connection. So there's kinda like... No one could really break that for me. 

I don't get the feeling that this woman is trying to be evasive or irrational.

I get the feeling that she is being true to something that happened to her.

And notice that Anthony is not disabused of his own belief that he can talk her out of believing in God. He said he asked her too many questions and that caused her reaction. Why is it that I am thinking about Aesop's tale of the Fox and the Grapes?

:) 

 

Try it this way. Suppose Anthony were blind and Valentina were being asked how can she be sure she sees the color red. What experiences led her to believe that? What is constituting her belief in such sight? (Remember, he is blind). What would sever her belief in the color red?

All she can answer is that she sees it. He can't, but she can.

 

 

I'm not in her head, but I am pretty sure this is an accurate way of presenting her perspective. This is how I've known people who deeply believe in God to be. I, myself, have had some weird experiences I don't talk about, at least not anymore. When I've tried, people tend to try to explain to me I did not experience those things, or maybe my brain was malfunctioning in some manner or other, or something like that.

In my own form of explaining, I don't affirm anything about them except they happened. I wonder and speculate, but I don't affirm. But I will not deny I lived those things since I lived them. I was there.

:) 

 

And that, to me, is what Valentina is calling a "connection."

She has a connection to God that Anthony doesn't believe since he doesn't have one. Her eyes have a connection to the color red that, if he were blind, would not grok because he doesn't have one.

 

This is where I believe James Lindsay is onto something about faith being one form of processing reality. If there is a part of reality that only a subjective part of the brain can connect with, faith is a good form for mentally processing it.

That does not deny or negate reason and sensory based knowledge. Nor does that deny or negate this other part of reality. Nor does that make any of this higher or lower or any other comparative. Each is its own thing. Smell is different than sound and they are each their own things. One is not a superior form of capturing reality. It makes no sense to say that.

With senses, we are sure red is red because we see it and a lot of other people see red and report it. We also have physical access to the world where red exists.

With faith, the only way we can have the same experience with lots of other people is through stories. And the connection with that part of reality does not interact with the five senses except sporadically.

To some people, this is proof faith is nonsense. But I can think of one case from that same perspective where it is not. Suppose human beings are still evolving. And there is one part of reality only glimpsed at so far while a sense organ for perceiving it is evolving in humans.

 

Regardless, the point is this kind of faith is vastly different than the gnostic kind of faith where a superior enlightened and revealed knowledge supersedes reality. In Veronica's kind of faith, she is 100% certain God exists because of her connection to Him. But she is not claiming you have to be.

And let's apply the "say and do" perspective. She "said" 100%. But what did she "do"? By her very act of stopping to think about it, she shows she is open to examining her premise and that connection. That doesn't mean she is insecure about it. She's just testing to see if any weaknesses have developed.

In fact, her 100% here (as I see it) means she did not want to quibble over minutia with a person who is obviously certain her connection to God does not exist in reality and wants to convince her she is wrong. She did not give off the same 100% certainty as people who are trying to meld the human soul to machines, to upload entire minds to the computing cloud, because they know... whatever it is they know.

 

If I am grateful to James for anything, and I am, it is because he made this distinction clear enough to me for me to be able to see where people like Valentina are coming from and know how different she is from transhumanists, or jihadists, or fundamentalist Christians, or Scientists, or Marxist or whatever. They believe they have revealed knowledge they can club people over the head with and that makes them superior.

She has a connection to God. That's all she knows. As she mentioned in the video, in her life as regards the existence of God, she was not disposed to believe in Him and there was no thought about it, nothing, nothing, nothing and suddenly there was something. That has not changed ever since. She also doesn't mind if you do not believe as she does.

She is true to herself and what she lived and she will not betray her mind to report differently. What's more, she is not hell bent on changing you.

 

Valentina, through this video, has become a conceptual referent for me for what faith in this sense looks like in a person who holds it.

 

Now that that is in place, off to more insights from James Lindsay and whoever else comes into this mix.

:) 

Michael

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I’m now going through a lot of James’ recent videos on this subject. I was surprised to hear him say that it wasn’t until very recently that he heard of or become aware of how much of the occult and esoteric thinking has affected western thought, culture and society. And my prior impression of gnostic thought was what he explained as big ‘g’ Gnosticism, I had always associated it with 1st or 2nd century proto/quasi Christian sects. The idea that Plato called the gnostics of practitioners of an ancient religion blew me away.

Thing is now I can’t not see the influence of this frame! Lol , seriously it’s everywhere. I started watching a Lex Fridman podcast with a former Scientologist , and as he was describing Hubbard’s explanation I couldn’t not see the parallels.

I’ve listened to a few of his talks and am trying to do it in what I think is the chronological order he has presented these talks, they are awesome and have been provoking a slew of new ideas. My inner contrarian keeps piping up so far , “okay , I’m hearing a lot of ‘not that’ , but what is the ‘this’ that the not thatism of gnostic thought is missing?”

I grok the confidence game aspect and the accumulation of unearned power but there must be a level of sincerity of believe among the initiated to account for the longevity of the grift ?

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Again listening to James last night about SEL , social emotional learning, (podcast "WTF is SEL ?") hit with another duh idea ( duh in the sense that I had not seen the framing prior and me being as red-pilled as I think I always was , lol), he commented on the phrase 'global citizen' or 'being a citizen of the globe(world)' which he correctly identifies as wizard spell in that citizen describes a relationship between an individual and a sovereign. This incantation is used to pave the way for a global sovereign by instantiating a need for one.

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Okay , ok last one for a bit

If you watch the video , you can see into the vestibule of the church , which I assume is in the UK somewhere. the tile on the floor is black and white checkered pattern which is a heavy 'masonic' theme , so that's weird or not. I doubt it is a random normal decorative choice given the history of 'good' churches and their attentiveness to iconography and symbolism, akin to there being nothing random in fiction.

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  • 3 weeks later...

It's been a while since I continued the idea of this thread, so here is another video by Lindsay.

He is covering a "package dead" concept called DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

I'm watching this now. I have not heard him mention gnosticism yet, and maybe he will or won't, but if I know him, he is uncovering a linguistic weapon that people with a gnostic mindset use to make their idealized final reality replace real reality.

(Incidentally, in Lindsay-world, Marxism and other forms of communism are forms of gnosticism.)

In other words, James is exploring one more aspect of epistemology and how bad guys use it to muddle people's thinking and prepare them for takeover.

 

In this lecture, he is unpacking Equity. He promised, over this lecture and the next two (three in total), to show how none of these parts of the DEI package deal concept work without each other, but when they work, they are deadly.

 

James said something at the beginning I found fascinating. He's a martial artist and has been for decades. And he said he is great at probing dense texts and writings and identifying the core ideas at root, and even show how they have been used in history to effect massive social changes. He said he is not good at coming up with solutions for rooting this stuff out of specific contexts. His only weapon is to put the jargon and concepts into an easily understandable form and let others build with it. The example he gave is how parents are organizing to remove Critical Race Theory and, essentially, different forms of apology for pedophilia from schools. He said that kind of organizing is something he is not good at.

In find the martial arts thing fascinating. In looking at his past lectures and writings, I now see that he approaches the explanation of dense texts in the manner a martial arts expert fights, blocking, dodging and striking at specific points, not at the whole body. But instead, letting the accumulation of this specific movies take down the whole body. Neutralizing a whole body is not the specific goal of any particular move (except maybe kill blows), but all moves are aimed in that direction.

And, after he has won the fight, he is done. He doesn't know where to take the victory from there except to point to it. But he can, and does, applaud those who pick it up and use it to effect their own social changes for the good.

Enjoy. 

:)

Michael

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MSK

I think I was listening to this lecture( I have been listening to a lot of James lately esp in regard to gnostic stuff), but if it is the one I'm thinking about he mentions SCOTUS jurisprudence as it applies to equity and discrimination ( Duke Energy). That reminded me of your idea of how there are 'real world' considerations and then there are considerations 'in court' or 'under Law'. So now I'm stuck trying to disambiguate the idea of gnostic thought and how it pertains to the 'practice of society', how legal principles are operated by and on others. ( not sure how to describe the fledgling thought yet , but perhaps the fringes are grok-able in this context).

Another funny aside, spell checker doesn't 'like' small gee "gnostic" :)

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T,

Here's a quote from the beginning of the lecture that I highlighted.

This one could have been written by Rand.

Quote

Reality doesn't really care about your theory. Reality is the thing you run into when your beliefs are false.

:) 

Using that as the frame, he said about DEI:

Quote

Eventually, reality is going to catch up with us. This stuff does not work as it's being implemented.

Or just do the short version:

This stuff does not work.

:) 

Michael

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On 3/15/2023 at 7:10 AM, tmj said:

So now I'm stuck trying to disambiguate the idea of gnostic thought and how it pertains to the 'practice of society', how legal principles are operated by and on others.

T,

The Law has been corrupted for a long time. Believe it or not, Glenn Beck taught me that in concrete terms, although, I am sure he did not come up with the idea. But he dramatized it and explained it in a good way when he was at Fox and that stuck with me.

The main problem with US law is called "precedent." Often a law on the books does not cover all nuances of a situation. So instead of a judge using his or her own brain to figure out the best application of the law according to the letter and intent of the law that's on the books, added to the current context, these learned Wise Ones scour the legal archives of cases in State Courts and other courts all over the US and see if another judge has ruled on this matter or a similar one. Then they ape the other judge. Often judges.

Lawyers are all too keen to help judges get away with this mental laziness and they either do the research themselves, or send armies of law students that they aggrandize with the term "paralegal" to do this donkeywork for them. Then in their pleadings, they include their research or get the info to the judge by a backchannel.

They are all looking for a way to not use their brains, but keep the mantle of power. And this grows and grows into a garden of weeds so unruly the innocent get condemned and the guilty get off all too often.

This process is called jurisprudence.

And the weeds grow so thick, the distance between actual laws and a case being ruled on becomes so great, it has to go to an appeals court just to make sure there is a connection between the case and the law. Once in an appeals court, there is this same jurisprudence problem, but it is far less. And SCOTUS makes sure the Constitution is not infringed by all the monkey-business when the legalese and jurisprudence bullshit in a case gets too thick for clear-thinking people to understand.

:) 

 

This is not gnosticism, although the gnostic-thinking people like it because it is much easier to defraud and manipulate than using clear laws on the books as the legal standard.

All the gnostics want is for a vision (a dialectic)--one that only they have because they are more awesome than everyone else on earth--to replace reality. Note, they do not want to improve the conditions of reality for humans or build anything with reality. They want to replace reality with a "higher truth."

Gosh darn they are so friggin' awesome because they see the fucking thing and you don't...

:) 

Michael

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Do you want to see a "negative" in action? I mean in the sense James Lindsay explains it (although this is not his example, it's just something I noticed).

The following happened right after I wrote the previous two posts.

A good example of a "negative" is the term "woke."

In case it's not clear yet, James Lindsay did say the following several times in different contexts, although his videos are dense so it is easy to miss it. A negative does not have to be consistent. It just has to do it's job of neutralizing the abstract.

I believe Ayn Rand was referring to this when she had Toohey say do not try to examine a folly. Ask only what it accomplishes.

 

Take a look at the mess this lady, Bethany Mandel, got in when she tried to define "woke" during an interview. Do not bother with the silly Twitter comment. I am posting this only for the video.

Here is the transcript:

Quote

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY: Would you mind defining woke? Because this has come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we are ALL on the same page.

BETHANY MANDEL: So... I mean... Woke is... Sort of... the idea that... ah... I...  This is gonna be one of those moments that goes viral, I mean... Woke is something that's very hard to define and we've spent an entire chapter defining it... It is sort of the understanding that we need to re... totally reimagine and re... re... reduce society in order to creat hierarchies of oppression... ahm... Sorry... I... It... it's hard to explain in a 15 second soundbite. 

 

Mandel actually does have an idea of what "woke" is used for, but I don't believe she is privy to the abstract-->negative-->concrete form James Lindsay explained (essentially Hegel's form). She fumbles way too much. That is the result of trying to examine a folly, trying to define it, instead of defining what it is used for.

Notice that she actually does have a handle on this at root. But she is now being mocked relentlessly on Twitter for being a dingbat who doesn't know what the hell she is talking about. And notice that each critic of her has a different notion of what woke means. 

So is this a double standard? Nope. Her critics are not defining woke. They don't need to be consistent. In fact, being consistent would be a weakness for them because something consistent can be debunked. An inconsistent definition lobbed by a mob, each with his or her own meaning, throws logic out the window.

The current mob is using Mandel's muddled speech to discredit her. And to them, that is all they need to do. The negative "woke" has blown her "abstract" (essentially the message of her book) out of the water without even delving into the meaning of anything. All that's left is the snark and they know how to do snark well.

Besides, that is what the negative is supposed to do. It is supposed to destroy, not construct. In the way the process works, the "concrete" (the revealed or bestowed knowledge of the Superior Tribe) will arise after obstacles like Mandel's idea are removed from their path. The negative is a tool to remove obstacles. It doesn't even need to make sense, just so long as it does the job.

 

I don't know anything about Bethany Mandel. I keep reading people say she is a Never Trumper and others say she is a Trump supporter. In any case, even if she is a Never Trumper, she still needs to learn this rhetorical method, especially since she wrote a book about woke.

I'm tempted to call "woke" a Randian anti-concept, which means a meaningless concept used to replace a legitimate one. But an anti-concept is a form of "negative" in the James Lindsay sense, not the other way around. Negative is the wider abstraction.

In this sense, "woke" as is currently used is merely a word to describe so-called intellectually superior people without saying why they are superior and insinuating that what they know supersedes what their opponents know. Why? Because they are awesome. Obviously.

:) 

This is (and works well as) a "negative," too. 

 

If you are still not convinced that "woke" has no specific meaning on purpose, that it is merely a form of wielding an epistemological weapon to confound and neutralize an opponent, that its purpose is to burn down ideas so that a "dialectic" or "ultimate truth" can arise from the ashes, look at the pretzels Jimmy Dore turns himself into trying to nail down a meaning.

His efforts are a clear example of what happens when you try to examine a folly in earnest.

 

On a personal note, had I not learned this dialectic technique of epistemological destruction, I, too, would have been floundering about trying to come up with a meaning for woke.

Now that I have learned the technique, the pattern jumped out at me the moment I saw it.

Now I see that the attempt to arrive at such a meaning is a pre-engineered fool's errand. 

The people who use the term woke in earnest FEEL they know what woke means. The term is designed for them to FEEL that, not KNOW it. But for the puppet-masters, they launched and encouraged the term woke in their propaganda knowing full well it did not have a specific meaning, but instead was a term designed--by them--to be a negative.

The good news is the following.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it loses its power over you.

Michael

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On 3/16/2023 at 6:52 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Do you want to see a "negative" in action?

Here's an exercise.

Watch this video and see how many times you can fit "woke" to "negative" as I discussed above (abstract, negative, concrete).

And Tim is not even using that frame.

 

Granted, Tim is trying to say the social media algorithm and chasing a buck are the reasons woke has so many meanings, but think about it.

There are plenty of algorithms and chasing the buck situations out there that do not result in a gazillion meanings for a social term used as a weapon against the culture of normal people.

It's the friggin' dialectic crap. It's this algorithm: destroy it all and raise paradise from the ashes. It's bullshit.

Watch the video and see for yourself. As I said, once you see it, you can't go back to ignorance.

Try it. You'll like it.

:)

Michael

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Here's another lecture by James Lindsay from 3 months ago at a K-12 Education Conference.

 

James is one of the few people I know who can take dry acronyms as a title and turn them into fascinating portions of a lecture.

This is because he shows not just what the acronyms mean, but how different deceptive processes are used to turn them into the opposite of their meaning so they can become weapons of power.

This lecture is a kind of instruction masterclass on how to arrive at Orwellian inversions.

The frame is basically built out of two physical elements.

1. First you have to start with elites (the kind of elites I call Predator Class) who have gobs of money and who have infiltrated the government (or governments).

2. Then they set up structures where they get to experiment on humans who receive government benefits.

 

For the record, here are the 4 acronyms James discussed:

DEI - Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
SDG - Sustainable Development Goals
ESG - Environmental, Social, Governance
SEL - Social Emotional Learning

 

 

Now, look for these things in during the lecture.

1. Every one of these acronyms stand for a smokescreen story that covers their reality, which is the polar opposite of each word.

 

2. The legal trick they use is to get a story using the acronym into different policy statements, laws and so on. Then they spring the same acronym in places where it is irrelevant, so to fix the relevancy, they themselves provide the rules through various artifices (like NGOs, regulators. and so on).

For example, Social Emotional Learning sounds good on the surface.

When this acronym and phrase goes out into the first policy statements and other places, they (the Predator Class people doing this) openly talk about the social and emotional well-being of children, about increasing the learning abilities of children, blah blah blah. Who can argue against that? IN fact, who doesn't want that?

But after this acronym starts showing up in the documents and policies and starts becoming laws and regulations, these Predator Class people come in and define how to implement them into reality and they shove in their political agenda as a touchstone.

So how do we make math social and emotional in concrete terms in a way that will "benefit" children? Easy. Instead of saying 50 - (2 + 2), they say we add 2 gay people to 2 transgenders and subtract the total from an oppressive white culture whole of 50... and so on. They do this with physics, history, biology and on and on.

They don't benefit kids. They indoctrinate kids.

 

3. This new rule-making often results in a weapon that can be used to destroy dissenters from the party line. For example, take the word, Inclusion. When it is first introduced, it only cites the people or groups that are left out of a situation and provides incentives for including them. At one point, an exception arises and instead of incentive, a demand is presented that a low-represented person or group get preferential treatment when they are a huge minority and the main group is more or less homogeneous. Once that is accepted, they start attacking the homogeneous group with a vengeance, using one case after another all under the banner of Inclusivity. Then, after that power settles, they start eliminating dissenters left and right. Add the rest of this acronym DEI, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and have it happen the same way and you have a political meat cleaver to take to dissenters and people who think with their own minds.

 

4. Many times a word in these acronyms has been defined in official literature as, say, communism. The process works like this. They eliminate the word "communism" but keep its definition. They reword the definition without altering its substance. Then they define the acronym word with that definition. James shows at the beginning how this happened with the word Equity. In other words, Equity was defined in an early official report with a paraphrased definition of communism, but the word communism was not mentioned. In later documents and policies, they allowed the communist inference to grow, always going back to their definition of Equity. At one point, if someone notices, they play dumb and innocent. And at another point, it's too late as it is a point of no return. Then they take the gloves off.

 

There are other processes James covers, but in short, this lecture is a masterclass in how to implement propaganda in the public sphere without anyone noticing until it's too late.

Enjoy.

:) 

Michael

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Heh heh heh...

Here's a cherry to put on top of James's video (above): Behind The Initials, From DEI to SEL to ESG.

:)

Emerald is starting to take the place in my mind where Ann Coulter used to be.

Except for one thing. I haven't heard anything about Emerald dating Predator Class progressives and neocons...

:)

Michael

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Another mass killing occurred. I am thinking about supporting the ideas of banning certain weapons, and putting crazy people into institutions. Is there an actual thing that is evil or only a person willfully acting in an evil way?

From Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right” by Jennifer Burns, page 100: “When she arrived in California she was working on her first non-fiction book, a project she eventually abandoned in favor of her third novel. Much as “The Fountainhead” had showcased her ideas about individualism, this book would reflect Rand’s growing fealty to reason and rationality. After three years in California Rand had redefined the goal of her writing.  Once Individualism had been the motive power of her work; now she explained to a correspondent, “Do you know that my personal crusade in life, (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, and not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth – the irrational.”

Objectivism and Rage by Barbara Branden. A lecture presented at the TAS 2006 Summer Seminar, July 4, 2006, Chapman University, Orange, CA. One cannot avoid recognizing that we live in a very angry age. At one time, people spoke to “My worthy opponent” when addressing someone who disagreed with their views. That attitude of respecting differences has long disappeared. Today, in discussions of politics, of religion, of environmentalism, of war and peace, of abortion—of all the issues that concern and often divide us—we hear little but raised voices and enraged insults coming from all sides of every issue. Speak to an opponent of the Iraq war and suggest that it might have been a good idea—and a torrent of abuse washes over you. Say that Israel is morally superior to the Palestinians—and statistics about Israel’s supposed “atrocities” of the last 2,000 years fly furiously at your head. Say a kind word about George W. Bush—and you had better take to the hills at once.

Objectivists are by no means immune to this rage. On the contrary, I find it to be increasingly prevalent among Objectivists. We see everywhere—particularly on the Internet—the spectacle of supposed supporters of reason and free inquiry erupting in fury at the least provocation and hurling abuse at anyone who opposes—even questions—their convictions.

But what I call “Objectivist Rage” has a peculiar twist to it, unlikely to be found anywhere else except, paradoxically, in religion. It is almost always morally tinged. Those who question our ideas and those who oppose them, we are told, are not merely unintelligent, ignorant, uninformed; they are evil, they are moral monsters to be cast out and forever damned.

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1 hour ago, Peter said:

Is there an actual thing that is evil or only a person willfully acting in an evil way?

Peter,

I can think of one thing that is evil, but it depends on people willfully acting in an evil way.

It is money in the hands of the Predator Class.

That's about as evil as I can imagine.

Maybe we should ban money for the Predator Class?

:) 

Michael

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34 minutes ago, tmj said:

Banning all firearms would be a logically consistent argument. If one argued for only banning some they would mean that victims of other 'kinds' are negligible.

Banning all firearms is ab initio an unsupportable argument when applied to a free society.

A ban is a law - criminals break laws - criminals will have the guns, ALL of them. 

The level of enforcement required to prevent all criminals and the criminal-minded from ever creating, trading, and using guns, would destroy freedom/privacy rights utterly.

 

No ... bans are useless and hence illogical.

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btw - This is not really a good subject for a thread on modern gnosticism, except it is.

Nothing better than top-down control, huh?

:)

Seriously, if you have a utopia in your head that is divorced from reality, what better way to implement it than force other people to act according to it?

Let only the government have guns and remove the right to self-defense and voilà. You get your utopia, at least on the surface.

But it might be a good idea to see how that worked out before...

What is worse? A mass shooting (prompted mostly by the Predator Class, but sometimes a crazy), or piles and piles and piles of corpses of people who could not defend themselves from jackboots?

Power corrupts, not matter how much that reality interferes with the dream of utopia...

Michael

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My point was , those that are currently sympathetic to the argument that 'AR-15' s should be banned are not logically consistent. They should argue for the outlawing of all firearms, if they reason the possession of firearms by civilians constitutes are and present danger to the safety of individuals in a society, at the least they should call for an immediate cessation of ammunition manufacture.

People who argue for a ban on AR-15s don't have a good argument in re advancing public safety. If removal of legal possession for a specific  type of weapon would somehow result in fewer deaths caused by those specific weapons , they should argue for making handguns illegal as hand gun use kills more people.

Firearms exist , I'm a 2A kinda guy.

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