Does Society have a Mental Disorder?

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

I am growing rather convinced that a new type of mass paranoia is at large in society today, a sort of anxious, delusional state of mind that hallucinates forms of racism/sexism/transphobia, etc, that do not actually exist.

Yes, these things do exist, obviously. What I mean is the inclination to apportion an offensive meaning, and thus draw an offensive conclusion, when no such offence was meant - or even vaguely in evidence.

Many good examples of this can be found in the Cancel Culture Examples (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?111532-Cancel-Culture--Examples-) thread. The most recent victims of this woke zombie virus were of all things the Muppets, and Dr. Seuss, on grounds of racism and/or sexual stereotypes. To me it appears as though a 'thing' does not have to contain or display actual racism these days, it only has to be arbitrarily perceived and called out as racist. Cancellation ensues and that's it.. What chance do we have if perception alone is the measuring stick by which we judge the world? Literally none. How can we judge the qualities and properties of existence based purely on implied perception?

'Wokeness' is strongly linked to virtue signalling, and political correctness. They are all variants of the same disease. It's genesis was totally benign, however. Woke was a watchword for discrimination (particularly racism), and sociopolitical awareness, and of course police brutality. It has since morphed into something far more pervasive and sinister, where each and every thing can potentially be ruled, implied or otherwise, as racist, or sexist, or homophobic etc. Is this by design (conspiracy theory), or is it organically driven? Whatever the case, today's woke warriors are on the rampage, cherry-picking examples of discrimination, bigotry, white supremacy (or what happens to spark their outrage) simply on a whim. Images, slogans and household brands, to films and books and now even kids' shows, nothing is sacred to this modern day witch hunt.

Overt examples of real social injustice are usually quite obvious where and when they arise. You don't need to be that astute in detecting them. Just basic conscientiousness is all you need. Wokeness has lost all meaning now. We have entered the realm of hysteria. Society has become more and more disposed to projecting its own cognitive biases onto the world, and seeing/hearing/inventing examples of bigotry and discrimination where none really exist.

"The term social projection was first coined by Floyd Allport in 1924. The idea refers to the process of creating knowledge about the characteristics of an individual or group of individuals based on the self as a reference point. .... Further, the process can and does occur without clear information [emphasis mine] about the true consensus of the individual or reference group. [Source, wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_projection)]. So is this what is happening?

I'm not a psychologist, I'm no expert on this at all, just an observer, and I'm only reporting what I observe. And what I observe is a growing state of mass delusion sweeping society. Delusions on this scale have plenty of precedent. Humans are extremely pliable and have a herd mentality. Think the widening political schism absorbing western culture. Think the banal trance of consumerism that absorbs our youth, that glazes the social fabric. Think feelings, which seem to matter more now than facts. Think religious conditioning! All these things not merely lend themselves to, but define, human (un)awareness in our current age.

Perhaps cancel culture and woke madness could be attributed to a form of Apophenia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia), itself a form of Pareidolia. This is "the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things. Apophenia is defined as the "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".

So, is society suffering from a mental illness? A shared mass delusion? I would say, quite emphatically, yes. And it's catching.

Here are just a few psychological disorders that I've been looking at, which I suspect are at large in society today. Although, I do think we have all been subject to one or more of these phenomena ourselves at some in our lives. We are fickle creatures, and flawed. No one is perfect.

Pluralistic ignorance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)
A situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but go along with it because they assume, incorrectly, that most others accept it. This is also described as "no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes".

Anchoring bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias))
The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor", on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject.)

Confirmation bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)
The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes.

Selective perception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_perception)
The tendency for expectations to affect perception.

Reactive devaluation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_devaluation)
Occurs when a proposal is devalued if it appears to originate from an antagonist.

Semmelweis reflex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex)
A metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.

Subjective validation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_validation)
A cognitive bias by which people will consider a statement or another piece of information to be correct if it has any personal meaning or significance to them. People whose opinion is affected by subjective validation will perceive two unrelated events (i.e., a coincidence) to be related because their personal beliefs demand that they be related.

Truthiness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness)
Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

Illusory correlation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation)
The phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists. A false association may be formed because rare or novel occurrences are more salient and therefore tend to capture one's attention.

Motivated reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning)
A phenomenon that uses emotionally-biased reasoning to produce justifications or make decisions that are most desired rather than those that accurately reflect the evidence, while still reducing cognitive dissonance. In other words, motivated reasoning is the "tendency to find arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe to be stronger than arguments for conclusions we do not want to believe".

Availability cascade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade)
A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").

Bandwagon effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect)
The tendency of an individual to acquire a particular style, behaviour or attitude because everyone else is doing it. It is a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases with respect to the proportion of others who have already done so. As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence.

Groupthink (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink)
The psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.

It might be said that these disorders do not merely explain wokeness, but whole variety of modern manias, and cultish behaviour in general. But all this has been made possible - and made to positively flourish virtually worldwide now - by mainstream media spending an inordinate amount of time and energy on 'social justice' stories, and fanning the flames in this regard. The vast power of social media is also largely responsible. Woke insanity can all but destroy a company, a product, or indeed a person, in a single afternoon with just a few words.

[Bill Ryan]

It's a VERY interesting concept that human groups of any kind have personalities — and quite often, personality disorders. That would include not only the whole human race, but nations, cultures, religious groups, political groups, cults, professions, cities, families, and so on.

The tremendous 2003 documentary The Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)) presented the argument that many, or maybe all, large corporations are psychopathic by every psychiatric definition.

The logic was compelling. I saw the film on a big screen when it first came out, and when I walked out into the street I could not speak for a whole half hour.

Here that is in the Avalon Library... I highly, highly recommend it:


https://avalonlibrary.net/The_Corporation.mp4

[Journeyman]

'Wokeness' is strongly linked to virtue signalling, and political correctness. They are all variants of the same disease. It's genesis was totally benign, however.


I don't think it was. (Dang, you'll think I'm paranoid!)

I think we are the victims of a deliberate piece of social engineering. Weaponised group psychology, a divide and rule strategy carefully planned and executed using all the many tools available to the deep state rulers of the world. There was an interesting study done by a New Zealand website a couple of years ago. They tracked the 'Occupy Wall St' movement from the banking crisis and they showed how key words on google were trending to show people googling the 1% and income redistribution. Then they showed the incidence of stories concerning racial or sexual discrimination in the media started to skyrocket and as they did the talk of redistribution and the 1% disappeared and Occupy Wall St became Black Lives Matter and Antifa, protest movements with mass divisiveness on racial and / or gender lines built into their core identity. Social Media was the most fertile battle ground for this to be seeded within but today we can also see some of the impact of that barrage of media stories, opinion pieces, false flag events, narrative supporting movies, tv shows, albums and concerts etc.

I think the playbook was honed in Maoist China, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and probably many more countries over the years. There's a very perceptive piece by someone who lived through the dissolution of Yugoslavia which identified exactly the same things which happened then are now happening to us.

Today, I think a lot of the people pointing the finger at someone for thoughtcrime are doing so out of fear that otherwise they'll be the next one cancelled. There's nothing woke about this, it's the opposite. People are silencing their own inner morality and substituting it for the skewed values the mob are repeating. We're being led to our own destruction and there's nothing accidental about it.

[Philippe]

I am growing rather convinced that a new type of mass paranoia is at large in society today, a sort of anxious, delusional state of mind that hallucinates forms of racism/sexism/transphobia, etc, that do not actually exist.


Oh yes and that growing conviction is what will happen for the many . What appears to be rational or scientific will be recognized as the fruit of insanity. Since some years I look at society as a patient in psychotherapy. There are underlying call it archetypical or other but long lost accumulated influences that manifest themselves in a myriad of expressions . The combined work by truth seekers is moving the world thru a delusional band of psychic pain. Just as with individual successful therapy there will be an improved outcome. It is only far more complex and enormous to achieve.

[Gracy]

Perhaps cancel culture and woke madness could be attributed to a form of Apophenia, itself a form of Pareidolia. This is "the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things. Apophenia is defined as the "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".

Wow. So yes, I read through all of the group think types of disorders, some I knew of, some were new. Absolutely this is applicable to loose knit groups like the woke culture.

But I think at the same time, if we're going to do this, an equally objective critical eye need be cast to opposite ends of the same spectrum, with a prime example like the Q movement.

I see these examples tending to only dip into wells of information that are assured of pleasing the confirmation bias, the group, while ignoring and/or ridiculing anything different.

I know I'm playing with fire here, but I call 'em like I see 'em, does anyone else see that appeasing confirmation bias is alive and well cross spectrum these days? I see trench warfare, and the trenches are only getting deeper as opposing groups continue to muster their armies for the righteous battle, while taking in only what they want to hear of the despicable other.

I swear it's like an all around spell has been cast...

[AutumnW]

Say it, say it, say it, Gracy May!!!!:clapping:

[AutumnW]

Thank you for this, Journeyman.

I've not been able to word it so eloquently, but this is, in my mind, is exactlywhat happened. And, though there isn't any way I can prove that it breaks down along party lines, it seems like something people like Steve Bannon might cook up. There is a good chance that the engineering is being done by those who benefit from perpetuating the status quo.

They want the left to think the right are all Q-billies and the right to think the left are all "woke." Lots of fighting, lots of division and who benefits? Same as it ever was.



hey tracked the 'Occupy Wall St' movement from the banking crisis and they showed how key words on google were trending to show people googling the 1% and income redistribution.

Then they showed the incidence of stories concerning racial or sexual discrimination in the media started to skyrocket and as they did the talk of redistribution and the 1% disappeared and Occupy Wall St became Black Lives Matter and Antifa, protest movements with mass divisiveness on racial and / or gender lines built into their core identity.

Social Media was the most fertile battle ground for this to be seeded within but today we can also see some of the impact of that barrage of media stories, opinion pieces, false flag events, narrative supporting movies, tv shows, albums and concerts etc.

[thepainterdoug]

but then we need come back to the idea that we all came here to play a part. that we have incarnated at this time to play out our chosen parts and interact with our soul family.
so this idea implies, all is as it should be.

believe me, I scratch my head over this every day

[palehorse]

Does Society have a Mental Disorder?
Yes, no doubt about.
but Everybody?
No, definitely not.

Just got some personal horrible news, my entire family is getting vaccinated, I am the only one out! which just confirm that I am the black sheep (their words). Their group thinking, peer pressure annoyed me to the point that I do not want to talk about it anymore with them, I wished good luck and I am on my own way now.
When I asked them, if they even knew what was in that vaccine (the components), they said NO and they don't care, since it came from the government (that's what they believed) it may be good.

A young cousin asked me, "why do you think they want to kill us? It is conspiracy, and it is not good."
I almost had a stroke on the phone. No further comments.

I will not try to convince them about anything, I have no power to fix stupidity. They really look very strange to me, it is like I do not know who they are anymore. This corona situation is creating gaps between friendship, relationships and families..

Sorry for the mimimi, I thought it was important to share some personal story on this topic.

[AutumnW]

but then we need come back to the idea that we all came here to play a part. that we have incarnated at this time to play out our chosen parts and interact with our soul family.
so this idea implies, all is as it should be.

believe me, I scratch my head over this every day

Keep scratching your head. It's a good sign. If you're not confused, you have a problem!

[Agape]

It may require couple more “certified studies” it seems to bring this important subject back to human awareness as “group consciousness”, more commonly tribal consciousness transferred their power historically, in long chain of migration, confluence, domination , subjugation and submergence, including exodus of many group consciousnesses we know nothing about today,
of our ancestors other than they existed and differed from ours.

But I’d leave the subject in hands of more advanced psychological studies and theories of consciousness than those prevalent and practised during the previous century by western scholars ( still walking their faithful rounds around Jung ) before we die, dry of substance.

The evolution and transference of social consciousnesses is part of every ‘civilised” creatures life experience.
They range from shared “weather moods” , periods of post-traumatic stress syndrome after wars, genocide or earthquakes to shared positivity bias of privileged societies.

Anxiety syndrome associated with sense of guilt of age, gender and education bias are also widespread and commonly shared in human society.

Most of our successful socialising is based in different forms of curtsying that itself originates from hierarchical patterns of various gnostic orders - now mostly out of order- mixed together to different new cult styles.

With respect to different social groups definitions whether they’re by blood or consciousness , the second being far larger and more important, there is also commonly shared tendency of “search for a culprit” or “identify the intruder” part of phenomenon that may date to social awareness of being prematurely merged with another social consciousness ( identified as “friends or foes”) and losing one’s own unique self definitions and identity to a nameless yet new sense of existence.


I see all these processes should be named , for the benefit of many different groups around the Earth going through the process of much faster rebirthing than ever before,
these subtle yet deep and moving human experiences should not be overlooked.


It seems to me that we may then understand each other better across the world and its different ethnic groups but not before we can calm our respective biases and take each other seriously.


Mental wellness and illness still seem to be stigma in many of our grandparents generations where people either meticulously ignored or even ridiculed the existence of mind , mental processes and sufferings ,
relativised its importance to the edge of insensitivity , worshipping the state of material solidity ,
in preservation of our better future ..(?)



The cleanest - sanest states of society can be only found in nature these days - such as I’ve experienced it with the shepherd people ( Gaddis ) of Himalayas and probably many other such people who don’t read the news ( tongue in cheek 😋 )


Best wishes

🙏

[Feritciva]

Does society have a mental disorder?

Yes, it's called wetiko.

We had a great thread about it:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?60718-Wetiko

[9ideon]

Yes.

Thst's basically all I can say about it I guess. It's so obvious it hurts my head thinking about it.

[Gemma13]

It's a VERY interesting concept that human groups of any kind have personalities — and quite often, personality disorders. That would include not only the whole human race, but nations, cultures, religious groups, political groups, cults, professions, cities, families, and so on.

The tremendous 2003 documentary The Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)) presented the argument that many, or maybe all, large corporations are psychopathic by every psychiatric definition.

The logic was compelling. I saw the film on a big screen when it first came out, and when I walked out into the street I could not speak for a whole half hour.

Here that is in the Avalon Library... I highly, highly recommend it:


https://avalonlibrary.net/The_Corporation.mp4


The 2020 sequel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Corporation:_The_Unfortunately_Necessary_Sequel


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orWQJJcoRiU

[Open Minded Dude]

I think 'society' always has been sick. At least in the course of history we know. This is why I shun and despise any herd or mob mentality or conformism.

There might have been a 'golden age' (Lemuria, Atlantis in its good times, or 'mankinds' we forgot about in history) where the collective wasn't insane, but we do not see it these days in history.

Whenever I am told by society (media, politicians, people around you who are 'normal', etc.) that I am insane I comfort myself with this quote:

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
- Krishnamurti

Most people seem programmed nowadays or exist in their own reality bubble / echo chamber which they share with their like-minded peers, or in the case of 'mainstream' with the majority of society. I agree to what Gracy May said that this behavioural pattern is also true of any ideological group no matter if left (e.g. antifa) or right (e.e. qanon) on the political spectrum.

Sometimes I think they all must have 'lost' their minds meaning that they really have no mind of their own anymore. Everytime when s.o. speaks in utterances that just could be from a woke or any other political playbook without even questioning what 'they' (was it them at all?) just 'said' I must cringe nowadays, no matter which topic it is (not just identity politics, actually everything). There seem no 'balanced' views anymore. Just black and white. Just fake dichotomies, so you are either this or that, nothing in between or completely different views are admissible anymore.

And yes, the abovementioned psychological concepts such as 'confirmation bias', 'cognitive dissonance' or just sheer will to comply by group 'conformism' come into play. Their omnipresence and power is frightening or (depending on the mood I'm in) saddening me.

If only the many brainwashed 'victims' would apply some common sense but this one has left the building of society long ago. Instead we have the "Emperor's new clothes" situation. Things that are very obviously ridiculous from a common sense viewpoint are the 'new normal' now it seems. And all hell breaks loose if you point that out.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Page_475_of_Fairy_tales_and_stories_%28Andersen%2C_Tegner%29.png/330px-Page_475_of_Fairy_tales_and_stories_%28Andersen%2C_Tegner%29.png

Just one example from Identity Politics now initiated fully by the Biden administration in the US: Allow all trans athletes (male to female) competing in women's sports competions and winning all the time with ease is something you cannot even criticise anymore although it is obviously injust towards 'born' (or 'cis' or whatever label I am officially supposed to use) biological women.

Reality has become satire. Or former satire reality. In my native language we even have the compound word "Realsatire" for this.

This Monty Python sketch from the 70ies seems reality today and you cannot even laugh about it anymore because you are not 'allowed' to. It is probably highly offensive by today's standards.

(Next to common sense also humour has left the building it seems ...)

sFBOQzSk14c
Don't get me wrong: I would support any trans or any other of the alphabet-people rights for equality and be very vocal against any harassment or discrimination of these people. But the constant bullying and cancel culture activism by the trans, lgbtq and other woke activists in the name of equality and 'social justice' should stop. Plus the injustice in any sports competition which is debunked by biological, scientific and 'common sense' facts, in my view.

Btw, Orwell's "Newspeak" in a way has also become reality by now although it was never meant to be a satire in the first place, maybe more of a warning.
Too late now. The proverbial sh't has hit the fan.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

I don't think it was. (Dang, you'll think I'm paranoid!)

I still think it began naturally, as a groundswell if you like of public indignation to racist and sexist imagery, language and stereotyping that was the norm in the UK up to about the 1980s. How many sitcoms from the 70s can you name that just can't be repeated anymore? And not out of wokeness but for good reasons, for just common decency. Some of the old shows are still around on various streaming services, and in honesty it's quite shocking what they got away with back then. Oh, they may still be considered classics, but some of the characterizations they used, scenes, sketches, lines and so forth, are cringeworthy today. Even though very often these racist and sexist tropes were delivered rather tongue in cheek, something had to give eventually.

So in a way, as tolerances changed, particularly in our entertainment, an organic and natural progression took place that said: this is not acceptable anymore. We can do better. In my opinion, this didn't begin as a psyop. It began as a well-meaning shift in social awareness.

What has happened since then is up for debate. I think it's probably very likely, quite as you hypothesize, that this phenomenon we call social justice was captured by social engineers, or 'powers that be' et al, to co-opt human interaction and affairs, theoretically to generate a form of mental, spiritual, and moral dysphoria - with a goal to create even greater divides between the masses. And they're doing this with both extremes, and at the same time. In cancel culture, what was acceptable yesterday is NOT acceptable today. But with the Overton Window situation, specifically the sexualization of children, you have another scenario where what was not acceptable yesterday IS now acceptable today. You could perhaps substitute this resulting moral dysphoria with 'moral schizophrenia'. Imagine an entire society suffering from that. It's becoming more and more evident that many people hardly know what's up and down anymore.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

But I think at the same time, if we're going to do this, an equally objective critical eye need be cast to opposite ends of the same spectrum, with a prime example like the Q movement.


Oh no doubt Gracy, I don't deny that. I'm not a strict 'Q believer', but I am an observer, always have been. Because I find it entirely compelling that there is something there. I don't apologise for that.

By the same token, I'm a keen follower of the UFO phenomenon too. And there are plenty of cultists in that camp, some total nutters believe me! I am not one of those. UFOs are very different. Personally, I know they exist owing to my own experiences. For those who haven't had an experience there is a crap ton of evidence that still support their reality. It's not really a debate anymore.

But we're talking about very different things here. UFO's are evidence-based. Q is data-based (you either believe that data on face value, or you don't). Wokeness on the other hand is abstract. As something purely conceptual it is built on shifting sands. We can only hope it blows away one day.

I suppose the takeaway for me on all this is how, as individuals, we relate to things on a personal level. How do we react to them. Are we a take it or leave it sort of person, or do we form a neuroses - do we get obsessed? UFO belief isn't a cult, yet there are cultists galore in that community. The same for Q, the same for religion, the same for anything belief-driven. The properties of a thing are limited to, and not exceeded by, one's own personal definition of them.

But then yes, we arrive back at the herd mentality argument, and groupthink argument, and everything else on top of that. There lies the danger. Is Q a cult? No. Is the Q movement susceptible to the same psychological forces that could consume and overthrow the mentality of an individual susceptible to obsessive disorders, and therefore create a cultist out of them? Certainly yes.

[Mike]

Many of these accusations of racism are arbitrarily perceived, as Star said, but they're designed to be that way. “Lived experience” is a term we hear tossed about in the social justice lexicon quite a bit. Someone's lived experience certainly has value, but what it's come to represent in wokeism is twofold:

1) facts no longer matter
2) intent no longer matters


Without a whole lot of imagination, one can figure out how quickly things can go off the rails when these approaches are applied liberally. A couple quick examples of both:

1) re facts no longer matter: I can't tell you how many times I've heard the following: “Black people are being hunted in the streets.” It's a preposterous statement, has no basis in reality, and is easily debunked by some basic statistics. But none of that matters when “lived experience” is evoked. If someone merely feels or wants to feel like they're being hunted in the streets, it's true regardless of the facts. The “lived experience” game has all sorts of fail-safes built into it. For example, it is now racist, we are told, to ask for details regarding that lived experience. We need to accept it on faith. Not only is it racist to ask, but it's an expression of “privilege” to expect a person of color to offer their “emotional labor” in the process. Ironic for a group of people who seem so desperate to be understood. And the group of people I'm referring to here aren't black folks as a whole - they're woke people who happen to be black. (as I've said many times before, what we're seeing now isn't a race war - it's a woke war masquerading as a race war, filled with all sorts of useful idiots perpetuating the ruse)

2) re intent no longer matters: One only needs to casually scan the cancellation thread here to see how this applies. If intent no longer matters - only one's reaction to words and actions - then anything can be punishable by cancellation by the woke mob. All it takes is one person to take offense. We've seen this multiple times with college professors, who are guilty of nothing other than teaching their classes as they always have. A harmless word or a phrase triggers one or two people, and the next thing you know the professor is “stepping down” after a tearful apology..despite a full confession of guilt and promises to do better in the future and the hiring of carnival barking race hustler Michael Eric Dyson as personal spiritual adviser and “racism educator”.


Just recently paralympian Seth Jahn was fired from the U.S. Soccer Federation's counsel for comments he made during a speech imploring the committee to repeal the rule allowing athletes to kneel during the anthem. He didn't utter a single racist word during that speech, parts of which can be read here(https://sports.yahoo.com/us-soccer-removes-council-member-racist-speech-megan-rapinoe-kneeling-protest-143845724.html But the committee voted to remove him anyway for violating a part of the conduct policy that says this: “...it was determined that Mr Jahn violated the section on harassment, which prohibits racial and other harassment based upon a person's protected status (race), including any verbal act in which race is used or implied in a way which would make a reasonable person uncomfortable”

Of course it's impossible to talk about race - or anything else that's polarizing! - these days without making people uncomfortable. If the rule was applied universally it would prohibit anyone from saying anything about race to anyone! It's a preposterous rule. Not meant to be applied universally of course, but only to the people that aren't toeing the woke line. Jahn said nothing factually untrue or inherently offensive – he was fired for making someone uncomfortable. And that's all it takes these days.

note: sorry, the post was slightly off topic. as far as the origins of wokeism, when-how-why it developed, the mechanisms and intent behind it, etc, and why it has resulted in the collective mental disorder we see today: I can explain all that in painstaking detail, and I will when I'm feeling a bit more energetic. It's quite a fascinating tale.

[Gracy]

(as I've said many times before, what we're seeing now isn't a race war - it's a woke war masquerading as a race war, filled with all sorts of useful idiots perpetuating the ruse)

I'm still optimistic that the movement will weaken, and begin rapidly losing credibility, as it tries to worm it's way into general society.

Same with the movement that longs to see certain people who are predetermined guilty rounded up off the sheets, or even suffer the ultimate cancellation as in being executed.

Neither are very healthy ways of looking at and interacting with our world, both are highly divisive new sprouts out of an ongoing culture war in general that's been slowly brought towards a boil for decades now, and the stakes only keep getting higher as each is thoroughly convinced of it's virtue.

[Sue (Ayt)]

(as I've said many times before, what we're seeing now isn't a race war - it's a woke war masquerading as a race war, filled with all sorts of useful idiots perpetuating the ruse)

I'm still optimistic that the movement will weaken, and begin rapidly losing credibility, as it tries to worm it's way into general society.

Same with the movement that longs to see certain people who are predetermined guilty rounded up off the sheets, or even suffer the ultimate cancellation as in being executed.

Neither are very healthy ways of looking at and interacting with our world, both are highly divisive new sprouts out of an ongoing culture war in general that's been slowly brought towards a boil for decades now, and the stakes only keep getting higher as each is thoroughly convinced of it's virtue.

It's similar to how we deal with cancer.
We can ignore it and allow it to fully take over, resulting in ultimate destruction of the vessel.
Or we can radically cut it out in an attempt to brutally and drastically destroy it, often having the same result of destroying the vessel, or the cancer just popping up again in the future.
Wholistic thinking offers more hopeful solutions, ie humanely correcting the underlying conditions that led to the situation in the first place.

[Mike]

(as I've said many times before, what we're seeing now isn't a race war - it's a woke war masquerading as a race war, filled with all sorts of useful idiots perpetuating the ruse)

I'm still optimistic that the movement will weaken, and begin rapidly losing credibility, as it tries to worm it's way into general society.

Same with the movement that longs to see certain people who are predetermined guilty rounded up off the sheets, or even suffer the ultimate cancellation as in being executed.

Neither are very healthy ways of looking at and interacting with our world, both are highly divisive new sprouts out of an ongoing culture war in general that's been slowly brought towards a boil for decades now, and the stakes only keep getting higher as each is thoroughly convinced of it's virtue.


I wish I was still as hopeful as you Gracy.

It (wokeness) has wormed it's way into every facet of society actually, from pre-K right thru university, and now into tech and industry at large. And media and sport. And the knitting community even!:) https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/cast-off-how-knitters-turned-nasty

And veganism! Here's a nice little argument for "decolonizing" veganism. https://theveganreview.com/

Unfortunately these insane examples are no longer outliers - they're the norm.

The only way out of all this mess is a strict, non-negotiable adherence to Truth. Not what we want to be true, not what seems to be emotionally or symbolically true, not what we "identify" as true, not our "lived experience", but what's objectively and unequivocally true. Emotions have largely been weaponized and used against us, and must be set aside temporarily in place of sober analysis. And then maybe, in 10-15 years or so, if we're still alive, we can return to some semblance of sanity again.

The problem is, we now have several generations of kids who have been indoctrinated into this lunacy. It might take several more to undo the damage. And I know I've been pretty hard on these kids and young adults, so it must be said that had I been born in the 90's, let's say, I likely would have been just as susceptible to it all. It must be terribly confusing being a person under 30 these days, having been mind-f#cked by all this divisive ideology right from jump street

[Constance]

ddddddddddddddddddddddddd

[Gracy]

@Mike. Kind of playing off what Constance presented, I'll try and narrow my focus a bit. Up until October 2017, the main thing I saw the term "awakened" associated with, was spiritual. We were talking about spiritual awakenings.

Now this "woke" crowd, I don't know where the Genesis of that term of theirs lays, but they sure as hell haven't ever even caught a whiff of a spiritual awakening. What they have caught on to, is that there are any number of unaddressed social injustices.

I note the same from the Q Patriot Movement. Not all by any means, but many of them have had a political awakening, their eyes have been opened to some all new and horrifying possibilities for how things may really work, but it's not a spiritual awakening.

I remember David Icke years ago describing how one can be clever, as in being clever enough to build a nuclear bomb, but do you have the wisdom, to understand the most responsible way of now being in possession of this knowledge and technology?

What's absent from this entire picture, is any aspect of spiritual maturity from either of these movements...

We have "woke", vs. "politically awakened". Both share roots in certain objective truths, but are also like a couple of children running around with a loaded gun seeing "reds under the bed".

It's like the old "fire at will!" Except it's really a firing squad, and a circular one at that.

I say we reintroduce the peace pipe. :nod:

[Mike]

@Mike. Kind of playing off what Constance presented, I'll try and narrow my focus a bit. Up until October 2017, the main thing I saw the term "awakened" associated with, was spiritual. We were talking about spiritual awakenings.

Now this "woke" crowd, I don't know where the Genesis of that term of theirs lays, but they sure as hell haven't ever even caught a whiff of a spiritual awakening. What they have caught on to, is that there are any number of unaddressed social injustices.

I note the same from the Q Patriot Movement. Not all by any means, but many of them have had a political awakening, their eyes have been opened to some all new and horrifying possibilities for how things may really work, but it's not a spiritual awakening.

I remember David Icke years ago describing how one can be clever, as in being clever enough to build a nuclear bomb, but do you have the wisdom, to understand the most responsible way of now being in possession of this knowledge and technology?

What's missing from this entire picture, is the absence of spiritual maturity from either of these movements...

We have "woke", vs. "politically awakened". Both share roots in certain objective truths, but are also like a couple of children running around with a loaded gun seeing "reds under the bed".

It's like the old "fire at will!" Except it's really a firing squad, and a circular one at that.

I say we reintroduce the peace pipe. :nod:



The term "woke" is meant to imply something called "critical consciousness" (I'll call it CC for the rest of this post). CC is a way of viewing the world and all it's interactions as a zero sum game - one group trying to get power over another group. For CC people, life is nothing but a power game between oppressors and the oppressed. For example: they don't ask the question "did racism occur in this situation?"; instead they ask the question "Where did racism occur here?" In other words, they just assume it exists everywhere and work backwards to "prove" the accusation. It's a ubiquitous mentality now, even among academics. There's a silly but disturbing game people are playing now, where a random word is typed into a google searchbox, i.e. is ( ) racist? It could be is air racist? Are apples racist? Is ice racist? And you'll almost inevitably find a serious article (sometimes scholarly!) indicating that these things are indeed racist.

That's the foundation of Critical Race Theory. And it's being taught to kids as young as 10.

But there are all kinds of critical theories being taught at university now (and high school and grade school). Fat studies, queer studies, gender studies, etc. And none of them are about what you'd think they are about. Fat Studies, for example, isn't about the dangers of obesity, proper diet, dangerous blood markers and so forth. No, Fat Studies is a critical theory that attempts to normalize obesity. It's all based on the belief that obesity being unhealthy is only one narrative, and that any attempt to suggest it's undesirable is "fat shaming" and an attempt of one group to dominate another - in this case skinny/fit people dominating fat people.

What all these critical theories have in common is a complete and utter lack of science. It's all about power as it pertains to race, sex, gender, etc. I just listened to a man talk about a scholarly paper he'd read about glaciers. And the paper determined that glacial science was totally inadequate in the absence of how glaciers relate to gender. I imagine you're quite confused now. Well he was too. And so am I. But this is the type of madness we're dealing with.

Honestly I still don't know much about Q. And while I can see why you made the comparison, I can't really place the 2 in the same ballpark ( Q and Wokeism). I assume you view Q as an undesirable manifestation of the alt right? Something like that? I dislike and am extremely wary of the extremes on the left and the right; the reason I'm always blabbing on about the dangers of the far left is because at the moment they're holding all the cards and their ideology is dominant in media, tech, universities, and so on. And their ideology and their activists are far more aggressive and power hungry. As far as I can tell, Q people aren't educating young boys and girls on genital mutilation, they're not promoting obesity, they're not teaching self hating and racist philosophies to kids, they're not anti free speech, anti free thought, and so on. Plus, atm there are no openly Q leaning educators, politicians, or religious leaders. The woke have infiltrated all those domains. And there are no Q departments in business and industry teaching employees the Q philosophy(whatever it is), unlike the woke movement which has "Diversity" camps set up in many universities and businesses.



Critical social justice people don't want to talk, meet in the middle, exchange olive branches, or anything of that nature. They only want to do 2 things: destroy western civilization and empower critical race theorists. This isn't my interpretation of things: they say it themselves in their books and scholarly journals.

I'm going to break all this stuff down really soon, point by point, when I find the motivation. I've actually already started. It'll take me a little while. It's all kinda confusing because words get used interchangeably, and it's hard to know what's what and who's who. But I'll explain it all. I think its super important for everyone to understand.

[Satori]

“Does Society have a Mental Disorder?” To ask the question is to answer it.

[Lunesoleil]

A cognitive bias by which people will consider a statement or other information to be correct if it has personal meaning or significance to them. People whose opinion is affected by subjective validation will perceive two unrelated events (i.e., coincidence) to be related because their personal beliefs demand that they be related.

I chose Subjective Validation, which is complex because it stems from group feelings that had the same impression. What if the goal was not just to respond to something that makes like-minded people. For the mystics this world is an illusion which one believes to be only the reality of a repetitive daily life, would not be a wave of the magic wand of the great magician or Krishna for the Hindus. Subjectivity is the extension of the truth which becomes ephemeral, all truths are like the water of the stream which does nothing but pass. Why should the truth be conditioned to serve the only logic to be followed when this same truth will suffer the wear of time? What matters is consciousness and it needs all of these available tools to find its true path, right?

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

What matters is consciousness and it needs all of these available tools to find its true path, right?

Yes, agreed. The obstacle however is the barricade placed before us -by those powers that be - which prevent us from reaching the truth and thus personal empowerment. This world of illusions is difficult enough without a mountain of state sponsored deception and conditioning muddying the waters too.


Why should the truth be conditioned to serve the only logic to be followed when this same truth will suffer the wear of time?

I don't really understand what that means. Truths don't wear away with time, only lies
suffer this fate. The truth is the truth is the truth, and it lasts forever.

[Lunesoleil]

I don't really understand what that means. Truths don't wear away with time, only lies
suffer this fate. The truth is the truth is the truth, and it lasts forever.
Oh that if the truth of yesterday will be replaced by another in the near future. There is not just one truth, there are many. We each hold our truth, following our plane of consciousness, our intellectual heritage, our understanding of the world, our understanding filters. We can say that the truth belongs to us, but that does not make a universal truth, but a truth at a time that we will have chosen to make our own, but that does not mean that this truth is immutable. Truth by itself is constantly undergoing its own evolution, with birth, climax and decline. Everything is not eternal, there is a beginning and an end ...

:ufo:

[Ewan]

Going out on a limb here, every one of us suffer from at least a modicum of some type of mental disorder.

It is a very unfortunate trait that lingers from our animal state. (Yes, of course we are still animals but we like to believe we are not.) I'm talking about the need for a herd mentality, it is deeply wired in our very being and I have often wondered why I seem to have scant regard for it. Every lesson I learned was done the hard way, but those others who didn't follow my path never learned a lesson through experience, they learnt it via adoption, acceptance.

The young chimpanzee in the jungle saw the snake that bit their cousin, it saw the tribal response of screaming, agitaion and fear. It is not a lesson you forget. These days, unfortunately, people are learning from how often something is repeated but with no personal experience beyond that. They never saw it, smelt it, experienced it. Its just noise, and its a cacophony of noise that requires discernment to discover anything at all. (How does one learn discernment but through a long, and often painful, process of experiences).

You can imagine how easy that might be to manipulate were you wishing to do so. Perhaps it needs no conspiracy behind it, it was inevitable. Currently the advent of technology and the result of various offspring - internet, social media etc. - is totally unknown, but there are enough alarm bells to think we really were nowhere near ready for this. Imagine you were born in the year 2000, you know nothing else other than a world of technology, communication, soundbytes and memes. You believe the internet is a source of knowledge, and it CAN be, but can you find it?

Mental disorder is in everyone. I'm sure Spock would agree. (However, emotion might be our greatest gift, despite the pain it can bring and contrary to what Vulcans think of human beings).

[Mike]

I don't really understand what that means. Truths don't wear away with time, only lies
suffer this fate. The truth is the truth is the truth, and it lasts forever.
Oh that if the truth of yesterday will be replaced by another in the near future. There is not just one truth, there are many. We each hold our truth, following our plane of consciousness, our intellectual heritage, our understanding of the world, our understanding filters. We can say that the truth belongs to us, but that does not make a universal truth, but a truth at a time that we will have chosen to make our own, but that does not mean that this truth is immutable. Truth by itself is constantly undergoing its own evolution, with birth, climax and decline. Everything is not eternal, there is a beginning and an end ...

:ufo:


If you stick your hand into a fire today the skin will burn off. Same thing would happen 5000 years from now:)

It's very important to understand that there are objective truths that are unwavering, regardless of notions of consciousness, intellectual heritage, worldly understanding, so forth.

You appear to be talking about spiritual truths and philosophies, and I get that. I'm just chiming in here because the "there are many truths" brigade is now attempting to apply that concept to everything, including basic objective and unchangable truths, such as sex and gender, and it's creating a dangerously incoherent world

[Lunesoleil]

It's very important to understand that there are objective truths that are unwavering, regardless of notions of consciousness, intellectual heritage, worldly understanding, so forth.
There is always a way to find a way out, that's what the powerful of this world do who have the law on their side. Normal, the laws are created for their advantage and not that of the people, in this sense Yes the truth belongs to the power in place.
The example of a fire that burns is like the water in which we drown, the earth to plant vegetables and the air that transforms the wind into a storm, these are the four elements of nature, natural laws that cannot be derogated from.
The truth of the spirit, of the laws, of the thought, is only an invention of men.
You wanted to trap me, smart boy. :dancing:
The truth is interchangeable and very often it is created out of nothing and often created in order to be clear and to be right.
In my astrological practice, I do not hold any truth, because like the snake my animal totem, which shifts by changing its skin, I evolve, which means that my truth will not be the same 10 years ago as that which I adopted today and the one that I would make mine in 5 years. Truth is not static, except perhaps for the rational mind, which will always find a truth that suits it.

[Mike]

It's very important to understand that there are objective truths that are unwavering, regardless of notions of consciousness, intellectual heritage, worldly understanding, so forth.
There is always a way to find a way out, that's what the powerful of this world do who have the law on their side. Normal, the laws are created for their advantage and not that of the people, in this sense Yes the truth belongs to the power in place.
The example of a fire that burns is like the water in which we drown, the earth to plant vegetables and the air that transforms the wind into a storm, these are the four elements of nature, natural laws that cannot be derogated from.
The truth of the spirit, of the laws, of the thought, is only an invention of men.
You wanted to trap me, smart boy. :dancing:
The truth is interchangeable and very often it is created out of nothing and often created in order to be clear and to be right.
In my astrological practice, I do not hold any truth, because like the snake my animal totem, which shifts by changing its skin, I evolve, which means that my truth will not be the same 10 years ago as that which I adopted today and the one that I would make mine in 5 years. Truth is not static, except perhaps for the rational mind, which will always find a truth that suits it.


Well in a liberal society, laws are made by elected representatives, based on what is desirable for all, which is based on rationally derived observations of objective reality. Yes, people in power will always be susceptible to corruption, and hierarchies of power will always exist, but they must exist in order to have a kind of coherent and ordered world. The world will never be perfect! :)

The people that are rapidly gaining power now - the "woke" - are not elected officials, have decided ahead of time they know what's right for everyone (they do not believe in individualism or free thought, or objective reality for that matter) and want to destroy western civilization(liberalism) and replace it with their socialist woke utopia...despite the fact that their formula has been tried many times before and failed every time..resulting in millions and millions of deaths.

Is it a mental illness? Or a well thought out plan?

Well it depends on who we're talking about. Many woke actually mean well, are not part of any conspiracy whatsoever, and are doing what they feel is best for society. "Useful idiots" you might call them. They're running on a program - Jung would say they are "animus possessed" - and are mostly operating from a very low resolution understanding of the world. They are definitely corrupted mentally and emotionally, and that is very much like a mental illness.

The people above them know exactly what they're doing and why, and are happy to manipulate the mob beneath them. But that's a whole other thread.

One game they like to play is the "nothing is real" game. The game that states that there are countless ways to view the world and they are all valid. Well they got the first part right but the second part wrong. There are really only a few ways to interpret the world which benefit all and reduce suffering as much as possible. One of those ways has been refined and improved upon for the last 5 centuries. It's called liberalism. The woke want to toss that out in the trash, because in their wondrous wisdom they know better. So they say.

[Wind]

YH07l10BbZY

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Oh that if the truth of yesterday will be replaced by another in the near future. There is not just one truth, there are many.



I evolve, which means that my truth will not be the same 10 years ago as that which I adopted today and the one that I would make mine in 5 years.

If a truth is replaced by another truth, it was never the truth. What you are talking about here is perception, not truth. As Mike says exactly, objective truth is unwavering regardless of perception. Truth doesn't change, only perception changes - in either gaining more clarity (of that truth), or losing it.

One of the traps of woke culture is its corruption of the word 'truth'. My truth, your truth, living the truth, and so on. The 'truths' of wokeness change daily, so how can it ever be the truth? This phenomenon is summarized perfectly in the definition of Truthiness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness)outlined in the first post.

Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.

[Patient]

All you have to do to answer this question is to go outside and to a couple open stores without a mask on and see how people react.

Although I won't relay the entire conversation here, but when you have a mask guard at a store explain to you why you should wear a mask "..because the particles of diseases are everywhere."

Yeah, it is scary out there because people have either lost their education or not had one.

I am by no means "highly educated" by phd standards or anything, but I have done my homework. That is what everyone should do - do their own work and make an effort to find out the truth.

[Delight]

I am not sure that "conformity" is a mental disorder? The following along with what others (are doing, telling us to do) despite what one thinks is true is endemic in human culture. Even when alone we may act out "conformation"? The major issue is how do we choose to be nonconformists when everything we "know" we learned? It's a conundrum.

I hope people won't discount the info just because it is on wikipedia? Asch conformity experiments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments)


In 1951, Solomon Asch conducted his first conformity laboratory experiments at Swarthmore College, laying the foundation for his remaining conformity studies. The experiment was published on two occasions.[1][11]

Groups of eight male college students participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how the remaining participant would react to the actors' behavior.

The actors knew the true aim of the experiment, but were introduced to the subject as other participants. Each student viewed a card with a line on it, followed by another with three lines labeled A, B, and C (see accompanying figure). One of these lines was the same as that on the first card, and the other two lines were clearly longer or shorter (i.e., a near-100% rate of correct responding was expected). Each participant was then asked to say aloud which line matched the length of that on the first card. Before the experiment, all actors were given detailed instructions on how they should respond to each trial (card presentation). They would always unanimously nominate one comparator, but on certain trials they would give the correct response and on others, an incorrect response. The group was seated such that the real participant always responded last.

Subjects completed 18 trials. On the first two trials, both the subject and the actors gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the actors would all give the same wrong answer. This wrong-responding recurred on 11 of the remaining 15 trials. It was subjects' behavior on these 12 "critical trials" that formed the aim of the study: to test how many subjects would change their answer to conform to those of the 7 actors, despite it being wrong. Subjects were interviewed after the study including being debriefed about the true purpose of the study. These post-test interviews shed valuable light on the study: both because they revealed subjects often were "just going along" and because they revealed considerable individual differences to Asch. Additional trials with slightly altered conditions were also run,[citation needed] including having a single actor also give the correct answer.

Asch's experiment also had a condition in which participants were tested alone with only the experimenter in the room. In total, there were 50 subjects in the experimental condition and 37 in the control condition.

Results
In the control group, with no pressure to conform to actors, the error rate on the critical stimuli was less than 1%.[1]

In the actor condition also, the majority of participants' responses remained correct (63.2%), but a sizable minority of responses conformed to the actors' (incorrect) answer (36.8 percent). The responses revealed strong individual differences: Only 5 percent of participants were always swayed by the crowd. 25 percent of the sample consistently defied majority opinion, with the rest conforming on some trials. An examination of all critical trials in the experimental group revealed that one-third of all responses were incorrect. These incorrect responses often matched the incorrect response of the majority group (i.e., actors). Overall, 75% of participants gave at least one incorrect answer out of the 12 critical trials.[1] In his opinion regarding the study results, Asch put it this way: "That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern."

NyDDyT1lDhA

Conformity of the anonymous crowd leads to criminal behavior here. How do we hold others to account when we are part of the same crowd?

ReUHhStG70k

[Gemma13]

Great article by Greenwald ripping into, (and rightly so), woke culture and its "toxic tactic" to delegitimize criticisms by screaming harrasment and abuse.

[Go to link to activate video/twitter excerpts sprinkled throughout article.]

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/criticizing-public-figures-including?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxODk0ODg0MiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzM1MDYzMTEsIl8iOiJtN084TSIsImlhdCI6MTYxNTQx OTg3MSwiZXhwIjoxNjE1NDIzNDcxLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTI4NjYyIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.iaejpUkxP1FhpdV W2vQVggac4voQFfvALIG2Q-Z5ZJ0

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society's most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

Glenn Greenwald, 11 March 2021

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

That is deliberate.

Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter.

By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on millions of dollars in dark money from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state including her own, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.

When Joe Biden announced his choice of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary and various news outlets reported that she had spent the last several years collecting many millions of dollars in speaking fees from the very Wall Street banks over whom she would now exercise immense power, the reporters who disclosed these facts and those expressing concern about them were accused of sexism. Somehow, a narrative was peddled under which one of the multi-millionaire titans of the global neoliberal order was reduced to a helpless victim, while the far less powerful people questioning the ethics and integrity of her conduct became her persecutors.

One of the many ironies of these tawdry attempts to shield the world’s most powerful people from criticism is that they fundamentally rely upon the exact stereotypes which, in prior generations, had been deployed to deny women, racial minorities and LGBTs fair and equal opportunities to ascend to powerful positions.

Those who purport to be supporters of Lorenz speak of her not as what she is — a successful and wealthy professional woman in her mid-30s who has amassed a large amount of influence and chose a career whose purpose is supposed to be confronting powerful people — but instead as a delicate, young flower, incapable of withstanding criticisms:

In the paradigm peddled by Maddow, Elizabeth Warren was instantly transformed from an outspoken, intrepid Harvard Law Professor, consumer advocate, and influential lawmaker into a vulnerable abuse victim. Anonymous Sanders supporters were the ones wielding the real power and strength in this warped and self-serving framework. In order to shield themselves from the same scrutiny and accountability every other powerful public figure receives, they’re resuscitating the most discredited and antiquated myths about who is strong and weak, who requires protection and special considerations and who does not.

No discussion of this tactic would be complete without noting its strong ideological component: its weaponization for partisan aims. Say whatever you’d like about journalists like Laura Ingraham or Mollie Hemingway or Briahna Joy Gray or political figures such as Kellyanne Conway, Susan Collins or Kirstjen Nielsen. Have at it: the sky’s the limit. Let it all fly without the slightest concern for accusations of misogyny, which, rest easy, will not be forthcoming no matter how crude or misogynistic the attacks are.

One also need not worry about accusations of anti-Semitism if one opposes the landmark quest of Bernie Sanders to become the first Jewish president or even expresses bitter contempt for him. No bigotry allegations will be applied to critics of Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Richard Grenell, or Ben Carson.

This transparent tactic is part-and-parcel of the increasingly ideological exploitation of identity politics to shield the neoliberal order and its guardians from popular critique.

Step lightly if you want to criticize the bombing of Syria because the Pentagon is now led by an African-American Defense Secretary and Biden just promoted two female generals. No objecting to the closeness between the Treasury Secretary and Wall Street banks because doing so is a misogynistic attempt to limit how women can be paid. Transportation policy should be questioned only in the most polite tones lest one stand accused of harboring anti-gay animus for the department’s Secretary.

The CIA and FBI celebrate its diverse workforce in the same way and for the same reason that gigantic corporations do: to place a pretty but very thin veneer on the harmful role they play in the world. The beneficiaries of this tactic are virtually always the powerful, while the villains are their critics, especially when those critics are marginalized. It is a majestic reversal of the power dynamic.

Those who invoke this shield on their own behalf do so by claiming that they receive abusive and bigoted messages and even threats online. I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. In the age of social media, anyone with a significant public platform will inevitably be subjected to ugly vitriol. Often the verbal assaults are designed for the person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other aspects of their demographic identity in order to be as hurtful as possible.

In response to Lorenz’s use of International Women’s Day to elevate her suffering to center stage, Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong described her own personal experience to argue that verbal condemnations from angry readers can cause “serious mental anguish and made me fear for my own safety and that of my family.” She acknowledged that “it’s not physical or material harm” and is “not legal persecution,” but, she said, it is nonetheless “a very real, constant, negative force in my life, something I have to think about all the time, and that sucks.”

It is hard to dispute Wong’s claims. Not only do studies demonstrate that a barrage of online criticism can adversely affect one’s mental health, I can speak from personal experience — vast, sustained, and intense personal experience — about what it is like to be the target of coordinated, bigoted and threatening attacks because of one’s reporting.

When Jair Bolsonaro was in the middle of his successful presidential candidate in 2017, he hurled an anti-gay slur at me using his Twitter account to his millions of followers. In 2019, he publicly claimed my marriage to my husband and our adoption of two Brazilian children were fraudulent, done only to prevent my deportation. Does it take any imagination to envision what my email inbox and online messages were like for months after each of those episodes?

From the time my colleagues and I at The Intercept Brazil began our multi-part exposé about corruption on the part of high-level Bolsonaro officials in mid-2019, my name trended on Brazilian Twitter on a virtually daily basis for weeks if not longer, accompanied by demands for my deportation and arrest. Much of the vitriol was anti-gay in theme, to put that mildly. My husband, one of the only openly gay members of Congress in the history of Brazil, and I have received a non-stop deluge of very specific death threats aimed at our family and our children. As a result of that, none of us — him, me or our two children — have left our home in almost two years without armed security and an armored vehicle. And it all culminated in the attempt to criminally prosecute me last year on over 100 felony counts.

That is most definitely not the first time I’ve encountered such criticisms and attacks, nor, I say with confidence, will it be the last. I was unable to leave Brazil for almost a year after returning from Hong Kong where I met Edward Snowden and published our first reports on the NSA due to publicly and privately expressed threats from U.S. officials of criminal prosecution.

I’m so far from unique in any of this. These kinds of recriminations are inherent to journalism (when done well), to confronting those in power, to insinuating yourself into controversial and polarizing political debates and controversies. Journalists love to laud themselves for “speaking truth to power” but rarely think about what that actually means.

If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.

Death threats like this one arrive in my inbox every week at least. When a news event related to our work transpires that angers large numbers of people — such as this week’s news that the criminal convictions of former President Lula da Silva have been invalidated and his political rights restored, thus rendering him eligible to run against Bolsonaro in 2022 — those threats and vituperative messages intensify greatly and we are forced to enhance our security measures.

Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.

But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet.

And even when such criticisms do emanate from powerful officials, it still does not rise to the level of persecution: when Jair Bolsonaro hurled an anti-gay slur at me online and then maligned our family at a press conference, it was not even in the same universe of difficulty as being threatened with prosecution by the U.S. or Brazil governments or receiving credible death threats. I’ve said plenty of critical things about him as well.

That is why I always found it so preposterous to treat Trump’s mean tweets about Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta like some grave threat to press freedom. Imprisoning Julian Assange for publishing documents is a dangerous press freedom attack; mocking Wolf Blitzer’s intellect is not. And if the U.S. President’s mean words about journalists do not constitute an attack on press freedom — and they do not — then surely the same is true of random, powerless people online.

That is why I do not consider myself remotely victimized: I chose to do this work knowing what it would entail if I did it well, and I continue to do it, rather than do something else, because it is a price worth paying. It is fulfilling and gratifying work to me, and I see the recriminations as proof of its efficacy. Not everyone will have that same calculus, which is why different people make different choices for their lives based on their assessments of the costs and benefits inherent in them, but the framework is essentially the same for everyone.

What I ultimately find most repellent and offensive about this incessant self-victimization from society’s most powerful and privileged actors is the conceit that they are somehow unique or special in the treatment they receive, as if it only happens to people like them. 

That is the exact opposite of reality: everyone with a public platform receives abuse and ugly attacks, and there are members of every faction who launch them. If you have any doubts about that, go criticize Kamala Harris and see what kind of staggeringly bigoted and hateful abuse you get back in return.

Whenever this tactic is hauled out in defense of neoliberal leaders — to claim that Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive, or that Corbyn supporters are, or that Trump supporters are: basically that everyone is guilty of abusive behavior except neoliberals and their loyal followers — the real purpose of it becomes clear. It is a crowd-control technique, one designed to build a gigantic moat and drawbridge to protect those inside the royal court from the angry hordes outside of it.

Last week, I participated in a debate on Al Jazeera about online censorship with the liberal British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She was quite a reasonable and candid advocate of the need for online censorship and I found the discussion consequently illuminating, particularly because she was so blunt about what she believes is the real problem that online censorship needs to solve. Listen to what she said:

Precisely. “It’s not like it used to be.” The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed.

That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of The New York Times — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop.

Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. 

Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence.

Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.

[Satori]

Great article by Greenwald ripping into, (and rightly so), woke culture and its "toxic tactic" to delegitimize criticisms by screaming harrasment and abuse.

[Go to link to activate video/twitter excerpts sprinkled throughout article.]

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/criticizing-public-figures-including?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxODk0ODg0MiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzM1MDYzMTEsIl8iOiJtN084TSIsImlhdCI6MTYxNTQx OTg3MSwiZXhwIjoxNjE1NDIzNDcxLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTI4NjYyIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.iaejpUkxP1FhpdV W2vQVggac4voQFfvALIG2Q-Z5ZJ0

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society's most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

Glenn Greenwald, 11 March 2021

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

That is deliberate.

Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter.

By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on millions of dollars in dark money from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state including her own, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.

When Joe Biden announced his choice of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary and various news outlets reported that she had spent the last several years collecting many millions of dollars in speaking fees from the very Wall Street banks over whom she would now exercise immense power, the reporters who disclosed these facts and those expressing concern about them were accused of sexism. Somehow, a narrative was peddled under which one of the multi-millionaire titans of the global neoliberal order was reduced to a helpless victim, while the far less powerful people questioning the ethics and integrity of her conduct became her persecutors.

One of the many ironies of these tawdry attempts to shield the world’s most powerful people from criticism is that they fundamentally rely upon the exact stereotypes which, in prior generations, had been deployed to deny women, racial minorities and LGBTs fair and equal opportunities to ascend to powerful positions.

Those who purport to be supporters of Lorenz speak of her not as what she is — a successful and wealthy professional woman in her mid-30s who has amassed a large amount of influence and chose a career whose purpose is supposed to be confronting powerful people — but instead as a delicate, young flower, incapable of withstanding criticisms:

In the paradigm peddled by Maddow, Elizabeth Warren was instantly transformed from an outspoken, intrepid Harvard Law Professor, consumer advocate, and influential lawmaker into a vulnerable abuse victim. Anonymous Sanders supporters were the ones wielding the real power and strength in this warped and self-serving framework. In order to shield themselves from the same scrutiny and accountability every other powerful public figure receives, they’re resuscitating the most discredited and antiquated myths about who is strong and weak, who requires protection and special considerations and who does not.

No discussion of this tactic would be complete without noting its strong ideological component: its weaponization for partisan aims. Say whatever you’d like about journalists like Laura Ingraham or Mollie Hemingway or Briahna Joy Gray or political figures such as Kellyanne Conway, Susan Collins or Kirstjen Nielsen. Have at it: the sky’s the limit. Let it all fly without the slightest concern for accusations of misogyny, which, rest easy, will not be forthcoming no matter how crude or misogynistic the attacks are.

One also need not worry about accusations of anti-Semitism if one opposes the landmark quest of Bernie Sanders to become the first Jewish president or even expresses bitter contempt for him. No bigotry allegations will be applied to critics of Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Richard Grenell, or Ben Carson.

This transparent tactic is part-and-parcel of the increasingly ideological exploitation of identity politics to shield the neoliberal order and its guardians from popular critique.

Step lightly if you want to criticize the bombing of Syria because the Pentagon is now led by an African-American Defense Secretary and Biden just promoted two female generals. No objecting to the closeness between the Treasury Secretary and Wall Street banks because doing so is a misogynistic attempt to limit how women can be paid. Transportation policy should be questioned only in the most polite tones lest one stand accused of harboring anti-gay animus for the department’s Secretary.

The CIA and FBI celebrate its diverse workforce in the same way and for the same reason that gigantic corporations do: to place a pretty but very thin veneer on the harmful role they play in the world. The beneficiaries of this tactic are virtually always the powerful, while the villains are their critics, especially when those critics are marginalized. It is a majestic reversal of the power dynamic.

Those who invoke this shield on their own behalf do so by claiming that they receive abusive and bigoted messages and even threats online. I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. In the age of social media, anyone with a significant public platform will inevitably be subjected to ugly vitriol. Often the verbal assaults are designed for the person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other aspects of their demographic identity in order to be as hurtful as possible.

In response to Lorenz’s use of International Women’s Day to elevate her suffering to center stage, Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong described her own personal experience to argue that verbal condemnations from angry readers can cause “serious mental anguish and made me fear for my own safety and that of my family.” She acknowledged that “it’s not physical or material harm” and is “not legal persecution,” but, she said, it is nonetheless “a very real, constant, negative force in my life, something I have to think about all the time, and that sucks.”

It is hard to dispute Wong’s claims. Not only do studies demonstrate that a barrage of online criticism can adversely affect one’s mental health, I can speak from personal experience — vast, sustained, and intense personal experience — about what it is like to be the target of coordinated, bigoted and threatening attacks because of one’s reporting.

When Jair Bolsonaro was in the middle of his successful presidential candidate in 2017, he hurled an anti-gay slur at me using his Twitter account to his millions of followers. In 2019, he publicly claimed my marriage to my husband and our adoption of two Brazilian children were fraudulent, done only to prevent my deportation. Does it take any imagination to envision what my email inbox and online messages were like for months after each of those episodes?

From the time my colleagues and I at The Intercept Brazil began our multi-part exposé about corruption on the part of high-level Bolsonaro officials in mid-2019, my name trended on Brazilian Twitter on a virtually daily basis for weeks if not longer, accompanied by demands for my deportation and arrest. Much of the vitriol was anti-gay in theme, to put that mildly. My husband, one of the only openly gay members of Congress in the history of Brazil, and I have received a non-stop deluge of very specific death threats aimed at our family and our children. As a result of that, none of us — him, me or our two children — have left our home in almost two years without armed security and an armored vehicle. And it all culminated in the attempt to criminally prosecute me last year on over 100 felony counts.

That is most definitely not the first time I’ve encountered such criticisms and attacks, nor, I say with confidence, will it be the last. I was unable to leave Brazil for almost a year after returning from Hong Kong where I met Edward Snowden and published our first reports on the NSA due to publicly and privately expressed threats from U.S. officials of criminal prosecution.

I’m so far from unique in any of this. These kinds of recriminations are inherent to journalism (when done well), to confronting those in power, to insinuating yourself into controversial and polarizing political debates and controversies. Journalists love to laud themselves for “speaking truth to power” but rarely think about what that actually means.

If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.

Death threats like this one arrive in my inbox every week at least. When a news event related to our work transpires that angers large numbers of people — such as this week’s news that the criminal convictions of former President Lula da Silva have been invalidated and his political rights restored, thus rendering him eligible to run against Bolsonaro in 2022 — those threats and vituperative messages intensify greatly and we are forced to enhance our security measures.

Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.

But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet.

And even when such criticisms do emanate from powerful officials, it still does not rise to the level of persecution: when Jair Bolsonaro hurled an anti-gay slur at me online and then maligned our family at a press conference, it was not even in the same universe of difficulty as being threatened with prosecution by the U.S. or Brazil governments or receiving credible death threats. I’ve said plenty of critical things about him as well.

That is why I always found it so preposterous to treat Trump’s mean tweets about Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta like some grave threat to press freedom. Imprisoning Julian Assange for publishing documents is a dangerous press freedom attack; mocking Wolf Blitzer’s intellect is not. And if the U.S. President’s mean words about journalists do not constitute an attack on press freedom — and they do not — then surely the same is true of random, powerless people online.

That is why I do not consider myself remotely victimized: I chose to do this work knowing what it would entail if I did it well, and I continue to do it, rather than do something else, because it is a price worth paying. It is fulfilling and gratifying work to me, and I see the recriminations as proof of its efficacy. Not everyone will have that same calculus, which is why different people make different choices for their lives based on their assessments of the costs and benefits inherent in them, but the framework is essentially the same for everyone.

What I ultimately find most repellent and offensive about this incessant self-victimization from society’s most powerful and privileged actors is the conceit that they are somehow unique or special in the treatment they receive, as if it only happens to people like them. 

That is the exact opposite of reality: everyone with a public platform receives abuse and ugly attacks, and there are members of every faction who launch them. If you have any doubts about that, go criticize Kamala Harris and see what kind of staggeringly bigoted and hateful abuse you get back in return.

Whenever this tactic is hauled out in defense of neoliberal leaders — to claim that Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive, or that Corbyn supporters are, or that Trump supporters are: basically that everyone is guilty of abusive behavior except neoliberals and their loyal followers — the real purpose of it becomes clear. It is a crowd-control technique, one designed to build a gigantic moat and drawbridge to protect those inside the royal court from the angry hordes outside of it.

Last week, I participated in a debate on Al Jazeera about online censorship with the liberal British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She was quite a reasonable and candid advocate of the need for online censorship and I found the discussion consequently illuminating, particularly because she was so blunt about what she believes is the real problem that online censorship needs to solve. Listen to what she said:

Precisely. “It’s not like it used to be.” The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed.

That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of The New York Times — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop.

Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. 

Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence.

Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.

Bump. This is a very important piece. Please read, and more importantly: please understand.

[gord]

From how social programming is used to imprint the official pandemic/vaccine narrative (https://secularheretic.substack.com/p/how-social-programming-was-used-to), but the video fits this thread.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8BkzvP19v4

[Delight]

This is a scathing critique.

q2O9RvBXcAg

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

It's quite one thing to come out as - or identify as - gay, or trans, or gay trans, or whatever other variant it may be, but when you come out as gay trans demon, and begin imposing gay trans demon pronouns on people, there is a big problem.

This is what happens when you indoctrinate kids with woke poison and identity politics: they go mental, literally effin' mental.

Or maybe, can we say, possessed?

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1450170666393686025

Edit note:

if you were wondering, this post contained a short twitter video of a pair of pierced, tattooed, pink and green-haired wokoids coming out as not gay, or trans, but gay-trans-demon, and demanding society recognise the special gay-trans-demon pronouns they invented. And they were dead serious. The video has since been deleted. Maybe they've been cured? :idea:

Edit note 2:

Found part of it on youtube (ok they didn't exactly have pink-green hair, but hey what ya gonna do)

Enjoy.

_ymEiWyyl4A

[Mike]

:bump::bump::bump: