This is an article by the incomparable David Mamet: American Occupation. Let me get to the core points he makes:
Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?
No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”
Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?
Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.
There was a time one might be able to debate and discuss. But for those of us who were once even on the left, as it then was, the modern left is very possibly insane although it is much more likely they say things they do not personally believe.
The World has gone to pot………………..
The layer under the instigators, that’s the layer which includes academia and the press and their slaves the politicians – they believe it.
Steve,
What if they do believe?
NoFixedAddress says:
April 20, 2022 at 1:19 am
Steve, What if they do believe?
That is the frightening part. Its hard to conceive that supposedly intelligent people act as they do.
As for the academics….. and they get held up and quoted as being an authority…. FFS
Not even a disclaimer of any description will stem from the universities.
We are definitely rooted
I despair at the lunacy that is now at the center of our universe
After a year of chaos and evil Joe Biden still has an approval rate around 35%, and over 70% amongst Democrats.
That I read to mean that 35% of the American population DO believe the Earth is burning, and they are happy with Joe being a puppet of the people behind him. They desperately want all this crazy stuff to be done, decarbonization, EVs, whatever. And the know that other Americans steadfastly don’t want any of it. Hence they’re happy to have a puppet in the White House because they are the ones pulling his strings.
Because these people, who make up the activist base of the Democrats are also the staffers of the Democrats it doesn’t matter what the party leaders think. They know they have to feed the animals or they will be eaten. Thus you have people like Pelosi and Joe and Schumer doing this crazy green stuff even though they don’t really believe in any of it. They go along with it though be cause it offers the drug of power and provides lots of money making opportunities.
Unfortunately this situation will continue while that 35% remains so fervent. Many others, especially women, are easily spooked by them via global warming scares, covid, Russia and whatever next that can be spun into something terrifying. And the Left continues to undermine education and to bring in uneducated immigrants to continue to build the ignorant spookable portion of the population.
I can’t see what the answer is. When you have such a situation it’s like the Japanese in WW2. They were nuts. The whole society was nuts, with giant chips on their shoulders. It took a defeat of Biblical extent and atomic fire to crack them out of it and discredit the militant samurai mystical tradition. And even then it was a close run thing. This current cult is even worse since it is more widely spread and threatens armageddon in only three or ten years time if their believers fail to convert everyone else. That’s more apocalyptic even than Shi’a Islam.
It doesn’t really matter if they believe.
It doesn’t matter if you believe.
What matters is that you submit.
“What matters is that you submit.”
Spot-0n, Calli
“Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?”
It is and always has been about “conditioning”. If you have been trained into rigid dogma since birth, it is actually quite easy to “flip” you into a different dogma. It is a “mind-set”. Think of it as “re-stocking” the intellectual shelves with different products.
Millions of fervent “Catholics” turned into communists of equal or greater fervor in the 20th Century. Then they did philosophical gymnastics rationalizing and loudly justifying it all to anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot. ALL of these death Cults have rigid “constraints” on prescribed (and proscribed) “heretics and backsliders”. It seems to work quite well, for the perpetrators.
By comparison, Pavlov’s dogs are wild, atheistic anarchists. Star Trek’s fictional “Borg” could almost be seen as angels of mercy and THAT is how it works.
Do NOT wish for “strong leadership”. You might just get it, good and hard and often.
‘… the country was occupied.’
And possessed.
Chuck Schumer said “If we win Georgia we will change America” – in reference to the Senate run-off.
They did “win”, and set about changing America.
They don’t believe that men can be women, they simply appear to be applying force to every fault line (of which the biggest is race) and creating new fault lines.
It is all about disintegration, and the USA is probably headed for a shooting civil war because the Dems will not keep their mits off the coming election.
David Mamet was once viewed by the left as one of their own.
They never forgive anyone for even a moment falls out of lockstep, which means that when it happens to someone (like a Mamet) that someone experiences something akin to an epiphany. All those virtues they thought they shared with the left in general they suddenly discover were illusory. The left might talk compassion and open mindedness, but they reveal they possess neither. So the individual who has expressed blasphemy discovers in an instant that they never really were a good lefty, or at least have not been for some time.
They will drift toward the right because they discover they already had some of their ideas, or are open to re-examining their own ideas. They still hold ideas not typical of the right but closer to what they left espouses but for precisely the same reasons they always held them. And that is great because they actually care about it and about people.
In economic days the paradigm was supposed to be that the right were the rich or the business owners while the left were the downtrodden wage slaves.
Now it is purely political, and the left represent regimentation, regulation, and uniformity, while the right represents those who don’t want to be jammed into an assigned existence. We now have establishment lefties and fringe righties.
The Democrats will not keep their hans off the elections, because they know what’s in the best interests of the country, and it’s for their own good.
Just read today’s SMH to see how blinded Australians are – especially the comments
eg – Megaphone
22 MINUTES AGO
When Perrottet says that “…Morrison’s approach was backed by a majority of Australians…” Where in his heaven does he get this information? His God or Sky after Dark straw polls perhaps? From memory ~78% of the Australian population were in favor of Gay Marriage whilst different in this context goes to the heart of acceptance and tolerance of LGBQTIA Australians by the majority of us. Vote LNP and it’s the ongoing spiral into extreme repressiveness.
– Zimmerman ‘angry, disappointed’ by Deves but won’t say she should go
– PM ‘won’t let Deves be silenced’ as fears grow for nearby seats
– Anti-trans rhetoric is nothing but a shameless grab for relevance
– Majority of female athletes support the inclusion of transgender women
– Dominic Perrottet tells colleagues he did not leak Katherine Deves text to Scott Morrison
EDITORIAL
Candidate’s distasteful comments are a stain on the Liberal Partyhttps://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/candidate-s-distasteful-comments-are-a-stain-on-the-liberal-party-20220419-p5aeln.html
oops sorry about blue – do miss preview as one with Old Eyes
The transgender thing is an interesting dynamic.
The logic the left have resorted to is utterly without subtlety or foundation.
“If a man says he is a woman then he is a woman.”
They have to keep it like that because any closer examination shows it to be nonsense and all the claims fall flat.
Okay, guy says he is a woman. As long as you remember that is all it is then the idea of him playing in women’s sports becomes absurd. “Well, he might call himself a woman but he still has the physique of a man.”
A guy says he should get time off work because he has PMS. “You don’t have a uterus or ovaries. Get into work.”
The inbuilt habits to take risks to protect women, to risk your life for them, even tolerate little acts of violence that would see a man decked, all this comes from the fact that women are more physically delicate, but also that they are able to give birth to children and nurse them from birth. If a guy demands the same sort of deference because he says he is a woman he clearly does not deserve it.
Guy buys a baby and has it suckling to no avail at his flabby chest. The activists would insist this is a new kind of beauty for a new kind of woman. What it actually is is a child having its instinct betrayed and a fat man holding the poor thing to what is only a sack of fat.
So the slogan. Because if you phrase it any more precisely you can’t keep a straight face.
Next on my shopping list: Recessional — The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch by David Mamet — a Jew who grew up in the bosom of the Democratic Party, then grew up. Thankfully, he writes like an angel.
Listened to Toby Young on IPA zoom last night Free speech champion . I think he believes Woke is about to collapse like the Berlin Wall with the sample results after not finding anyone who supported it . Thinks world governments ,lockdown masks etc thinking about to reverse .
Theodore Dalrymple explained it best – It IS absurd, its meant to be – by forcing people to agree to absurdities do you break them…
What I could never understand, and I remember reading Mamets reversal years ago, was how an obviously intelligent person could hold those beliefs in the first place. I always thought you needed to have a screw loose to hold these left wing views, so how could you reverse this unless, of course, these views weren’t sincerely held in the first place? And if so, what would prevent a pivot back? Humans are sure complicated.
It’s tribal.
The hive mind gives leftards the security of the herd, where they don’t have to think for themselves, just move with the herd.
The non-lefties I most want to listen to are ex-lefties like me. Mamet’s value is not only in having been the opposite of what he is now, but in being able to articulate his journey — which he does brilliantly.
As a few have pointed out – the aim is to have the populace so inured to lies that the government can do, or have some of the community do for them, just about anything.
We’ll be killing all the sparrows before you know it.
We’ll be killing all the sparrows before you know it.
Can we make that Indian Mynahs?
Anorexic girl looking at herself in the mirror:
“I’m fat!”
Reply: “No, you’re not. If you really believe that, you’re mentally sick.”
Ditto for our society, cet. par. And shame on our gutless politicians who won’t call a spade a spade.
You’ll have to find one first.
Where have all the sparrows gone?
Back to topic…
“The time will come when people will go mad. They will look at those who are not mad and attack them, crying out ‘You are not like us; you must be mad.’”
St. Antony the Great (+AD356)
I think we may be living in the time the saint foresaw.
UCLA Stocks Its Men’s Restrooms With Tampons
You’d think every second kid was queueing for a snip/tuck. In fact the number of people involved is infinitesimal. In the 2016 census, 40 people.
https://www.diannakenny.com.au/k-blog/itemlist/tag/Transgender%20hysteria.html#:~:text=Transgender%20population%20estimates&text=3.2%25%20indicated%20that%20they%20were,yet%20crashed%20on%20Australian%20shores.
OldOzzie – some chaps at UCLA have ahh… leaky clackers.
The polls show that Biden’s support amongst women with degrees is up by 4% since the election.
Great argument for closing universities down
uni degrees have been a dirty joke for many years
These are the same little darlings who will vote for the “Independents” . And they are gradually assuming power in many walks of life (none which involve getting your hands dirty, of course.)
Panicky moment ‘each-way Albo’ REFUSES to let his deputies comment on whether trans women should play sport against females – as Labor leader tries to avoid ANOTHER press conference catastrophe
– The issue has dominated the past week of the federal election campaign
– Mr Albanese would not let two Labor shadow ministers answer a question
– Liberal candidate trolled by vile activists who sent rape and death threats
Boffinsays:
April 20, 2022 at 1:10 pm
You’d think every second kid was queueing for a snip/tuck. In fact the number of people involved is infinitesimal. In the 2016 census, 40 people.
It will be interesting to see the results of the next Census, after years of propaganda/grooming.
“UCLA Stocks Its Men’s Restrooms With Tampons”
Worse – a man identifying as a trans is in a US prison. He has gotten 2 inmates pregnant, one of which is in for life.
It seems that you don’t even need to have had surgery to remove your dangly bits to go to a woman’s prison, just say you are a woman and maybe wear a dress. Clearly, this “woman” is a lesbian, so being a minority, you better not dis “her”.
Mother Lode:
It’s about making people lie about what they believe.
“Guy buys a baby and has it suckling to no avail at his flabby chest. The activists would insist this is a new kind of beauty for a new kind of woman. What it actually is is a child having its instinct betrayed and a fat man holding the poor thing to what is only a sack of fat.”
When a person is forced to say your quote above, they have surrendered their free will to the mob, and cannot return to their original honesty.