| From: Joachim K | 11/13/2022 10:53:52 PM | | | | | | It Isn't Cognitive Dissonance; It's Doublethink
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, NOV 13, 2022 - 09:00 PM
Authored by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson via 'From Symptoms to Causes' Substack,
Cognitive dissonance is when people feel discomfort due to discrepancies in their own thoughts or beliefs.
As an example, someone who takes pride in being honest, feels such discomfort when he tells a lie.
Another example of cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt by members of a cult when they seek to explain how the end of the world was postponed, as their apocalyptic prophecy did not come true.
The term was in fact coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in his studies of such cults in the 1950s.
The opposite of cognitive dissonance is doublethink, a word that first appeared in George Orwell’s 1984.
Doublethink is the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs at the same time, while being totally unaware of the contradiction. In Orwell’s own words:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.
This morning I saw an excellent example of this on someone’s Facebook wall (translated by FB from the Icelandic, so not perfect):
Tertullian, one of the church fathers, born in the late second century, made the following observation regarding the birth, death and resurrection of Christ:
Natus est Dei Filius, non pudet, quia pudendum est;
et mortuus est Dei Filius, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est;
et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile.
In English:
“The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful.
And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is unsound.
And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.”
Here, the contradiction is religious; only God can contradict himself, the absurd is allowed only to God; we mere mortals are bound by the rules of nature and the rules of logic. The only exemption is that through profound religious experience we can transcend the rules of logic and believe the absurd, hence “it is certain, because it is impossible.”
Does doublespeak have a religious dimension then?
Has the person who believes two contradictory statements at the same time in some way transcended reason, and entered into a religious dimension? Or has he simply lost his mind? |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/18/2022 5:22:35 PM | | | | | | ‘Et tu, Conrad?’ Even the ever-loyal Lord Black has turned on Donald Trump
With every vulgarity or indecency, Black rushed to defend his friend. He now joins a legion of Republicans who no longer think Trump a winner.
By Andrew Cohen
Fri., Nov. 18, 2022
For years, Donald Trump has had no more devoted disciple than Conrad Black. In a full-throated roar across columns, interviews and the 256 pages of a literary valentine, Black has expressed an enduring admiration and unshakable affection for Trump — before, during and after his presidency.
It’s uncanny, really. His fealty is quaint, courtly and even old-fashioned in this age of infidelity.
So, if you are Black’s “loyal friend,” “rather generous” and “always cordial,” a “raconteur” and “a good listener” who “never speaks over people” at a dinner party, it matters. If you were “extremely supportive” and “offered evidence” when Black was on trial for fraud and later in jail, it really matters.
For the last eight years or so — notably from the time Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, over the four years of his presidency and the two years since, Black has used his megaphone to defend Trump, excuse him and forgive him. Always.
With every cruelty, vulgarity and indecency Trump visited upon someone or something, with every illustration or allegation of self-enrichment, impropriety or criminality, Black would rush to the ramparts. Black could see the “stable genius” that Trump himself declared but most Americans did not see, even as Trump runs for president once again. ( He announced his candidacy Tuesday.)
There was Black, for example, claiming Trump did nothing wrong on Jan. 6, 2021, because he urged his supporters “ to demonstrate peacefully” as they marched on the Capitol. Prosecutors may disagree.
Trump could always rely on Black to mobilize his celebrity and deploy his arsenal of “rotund phrases,” as Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, describes his use of language.
Sure, admits Black, Trump has had “ stylistic infelicities” and “vagaries,” as if he were your dotty uncle. And yes, his friend possessed a few harmless eccentricities, such as degrading women, insulting war heroes, trading in casual antisemitism and courting the Proud Boys. But this was Trump being Trump, a man of “foibles” and “fallibilities,” whom Black sees as “ a candidate” for Mount Rushmore.
“There is plenty of room to dislike or disagree with Donald Trump, but he is an astonishing political phenomenon,” Black says. All reasonable, wouldn’t you agree? As Black maintained to The New Yorker in 2020, “I am not whitewashing this guy.”
But if you disagree with Black on Trump, watch out. Black energetically lashes out at skeptical journalists. This is the danger of crossing Lord Black of Crossharbour.
Of course, becoming apologist-in-chief for the twice-impeached Trump had nothing to do with the pardon Trump gave Black in 2019. Which had nothing to do with the encomium (“A President Like No Other”) that Black published in 2018. Of course not.
Black was so besotted it clouded his judgment. He predicted big victories for Republicans in the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. (In 2019, Black predicted a historic Trump 2020 landslide like those enjoyed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and FDR in 1936.)
All of which is context for the Great Renunciation. Days after this month’s midterm elections, Black did the unthinkable: he broke with Trump. No longer was Trump presumptive president, as Black predicted — now he was past president.
In a betrayal for the ages, Black has turned on Trump. He has knifed him and thrown him under the chariot. Gazing at the assassin holding the ink-stained dagger, a bloodied Trump must have thought: “Et tu, Conrad?”
In his “updated assessment” for the National Post, Black graciously allows for “my mistaken prediction” that after the midterm elections Trump “will take even greater control than ever of the Republican Party.”
Black says he believes in “the utility of confession,” though this does not appear to mean apologizing for championing Trump as he peddled the canard of the “stolen” 2020 presidential election — and pushed hundreds of lawmakers to embrace the lie. Curiously, Black doesn’t say he was wrong about Trump as president, or even as a human being.
Suddenly, Black joins a legion of Republicans who no longer think Trump is a winner. They’re abandoning him. It’s an exquisite, head-spinning reversal. Now the future is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Black anoints “a worthy continuator of the best aspects of the Trump legacy.”
So, the romance is over. Lord Black — obligations met, debts paid, book published, pardon conferred — has found a better prospect. Loyalty has its limits.
Andrew Cohen is a journalist, a professor at Carleton University and author of “Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.” |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/19/2022 11:56:18 PM | | | | | | Conrad Black: A Step Toward National Suicide?
BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, NOV 19, 2022 - 10:30 PM
Authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Nov. 8 midterm elections were a watershed in modern American history. The implications of choosing a president whom the public strongly disapproves of and is generally a failure, over a controversial but undoubtedly capable and successful ex-president, are very serious.
Democrat Party materials encouraging people to vote in the midterm general election are seen in Philadelphia on Nov, 7, 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
That the Democrats and their lock-step allies in the national media succeeded in putting across the colossal smear that former President Donald Trump is a supporter of violence and a threat to the constitutional system could be interpreted as a long step toward the national suicide that Abraham Lincoln foresaw is the only way in which the American project could perish.
Former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump a traitor; former National Intelligence Director James Clapper declared as a matter of settled fact that Trump was a Russian intelligence asset. The corruption of the FBI and the intelligence agencies in the dissemination of the infamous Steele dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign as authentic intelligence revealing Trump as completely unsuited to public office and the profound dishonesty of former FBI Director James Comey in white-washing Clinton’s alleged destruction of subpoenaed evidence and his recourse to surveillance granted in response to false affidavits while attempting to destroy the Trump presidency have escaped legal retribution by the somnambulant Durham investigation, and there will be no retribution for any of it.
Yet, Trump is the tainted protagonist. The Russian collusion hoax was the most monstrous defamation ever inflicted on a U.S. president. The spurious impeachment of him, for an innocuous telephone call to the president of Ukraine about the commercial activities of the Biden family in his country—now notorious but probably a matter of political suppression of the normal working of American justice—was in the same category of misuse of the political system for the lowest and most destructive partisan ends.
It’s obvious that the potentially millions of harvested ballots that couldn’t be verified in the 2020 presidential election could easily have provided the 50,000 vote switchover needed in Pennsylvania and two other states to flip that election to Trump in the Electoral College. The dishonesty of the universal media stone wall that 2020 was a pristine presidential election is compounded by the judiciary’s abdication of its coequal role in government and reassertion of its refusal to consider overturning the apparent presidential election result.
Democratic strategists deserve a near-perfect score for tactical judgment: They rounded up a big majority among young voters by hammering the abortion issue, emphasizing the reduction in marijuana penalties, and championing student loan forgiveness. This and the malicious and unctuous pressing of the safety of democracy as a euphemism for the defamatory nonsense that Trump was a menace to the Constitution turned the minds of an adequate number of voters to produce a dangerously perverse result. They have pretty well given up the former slanders that Trump is a racist, homophobe, and misogynist.
Tabulating all of the votes cast for all offices contested last week, the Republicans outpolled the Democrats all over. The Democrats only took what they needed. Politics is a notoriously unjust occupation; Trump is objectively perhaps among the 10 most successful holders of that office. But he did great harm to himself by his lack of public relations judgment, and this fact in the hands of the political and social media monopoly of his enemies working with the strategists and saboteurs in the Democratic leadership have unfortunately won the match.
But even the voters who rendered such an ambiguous result on Nov. 8 have betrayed a concern that the incompetence of the Biden administration, with the duplicity of the Democratic congressional leaders, can’t go on indefinitely. But they’ve demonstrated that Trump isn’t the man to stop them and to tear the government apart and repopulate it with people with clean hands.
There’s still an important place for Trump to complete the task that he commenced of transporting the Republican Party from the country clubs to the championship of the disadvantaged and working and middle class of America, and to cleaning out the bipartisan infestation of placemen and decayed servitors of the federal political and administrative state. But the former president is far from blameless in his own misfortunes. He warned of the dangers of ballot harvesting in 2020 but was completely inadequate in taking preventive measures or even following up efficiently to challenge the vulnerable points. Instead, we had the well-intended but completely ineffectual efforts of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell. In order to make his case plausibly, he absolutely had to avoid precisely the sort of outrage that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021. But the fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser paid no attention to Trump’s warnings that matters could get out of hand and his offer of 20,000 National Guardsmen indicates the Democrats’ role was a good deal less innocent than they pretend.
But Trump knew what desperate and sleazy people he was dealing with, and he doesn’t have a credible excuse for being so reckless. This condemned him to having to continue to emphasize the 2020 election irregularities in order to justify his calling forth such a huge and discontented crowd at the Washington Elipse on Jan. 6, 2021. Of course, he no more sought an insurrection than Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did.
The only way to complete Trump’s work and root out and politically exterminate those who have corrupted the intelligence and justice arms of the federal government and have dragooned the contemptible but still insidiously influential national political media in full metal jacket Trump-hate, is for Trump to identify and support the successor whom he favors as Republican presidential candidate.
He shouldn’t go back to his 2016 playbook and insult all the other prominent Republicans. He has exchanged enough fire with his Republican enemies, contemptible though many of them are, and did well to win the first round and come so close in the second. The third round last week was an acute disappointment, and the Republican Party doesn’t need, and the American public doesn’t wish for, an internecine war on the scale that would rage if Trump sought another presidential nomination. But another candidate plausibly pledged to the enactment of the Trump program and supported by Trump but not stigmatized by him, could lead the desperately needed national political purgation.
Read more here... |
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| From: Joachim K | 11/20/2022 1:25:39 PM | | | | | | Kevin McCarthy says he’ll remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs committee because of her antisemitism
NOV 20, 2022 1:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
1 COMMENT
We’ll see if McCarthy follows through. Don’t be surprised if they strike some deal and he backs down.
“Kevin McCarthy to pull Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs committee over antisemitism,” by Ari Hoffman, The Post Millennial, November 19, 2022:
Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Saturday that when he becomes the speaker of the House of Representatives in January he plans to remove “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-MN), from the House Foreign Affairs Committee due to her “antisemitic” comments.
When the Republicans take the majority in the House next year, McCarthy will likely become the next speaker, pending a vote for the position on Jan. 3.
Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2022 leadership meeting in Las Vegas McCarthy pledged to the audience “We watch antisemitism grow, not just on our campuses, but we watched it grow In the halls of Congress. I promised you last year that as speaker she will no longer be on Foreign Affairs, and I’m keeping that promise.”
The room erupted in cheers in response.
Since she was elected to Congress in 2018, Omar has had a history of making many comments against Jews and Israel and using antisemitic tropes. After being elected to Congress, she submitted a resolution to the House comparing boycotting the Jewish state of Israel to boycotting the Nazis.
In February 2021, 1,500 rabbis called on Congress to rescind the appointment of Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-MN), to the position of vice chair of the House foreign affairs subcommittee based on her past anti-Semitic statements and behavior.
Omar has an extensive history of using anti-Semitic statements and tropes as well as promoting conspiracy theories about Jews. In a now-deleted tweet Omar wrote “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza#Palestine#Israel”
In another now-deleted tweet, Omar said Jews were buying political support tweeting, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.”
According to The Daily Wire, in an interview, Omar suggested: “Israel should not be allowed to exist as a Jewish state, Israel is not a democracy, and compared Israel to Iran — which is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”
Omar also embraced the anti-Semitic heads of the Woman’s March which included Linda Sarsour…. |
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| From: Joachim K | 12/14/2022 12:38:33 AM | | | | | | Carlson went on to discuss Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) statement that "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this," regarding former President Donald Trump."How could he say something like that?" Carlson said, adding "How could you, as the head Democrat in the Senate, accept a system where the people are not in charge? It is not a democracy. Unelected spy agencies are controlling the outcome of domestic politics, like, you’re ok with that?"
"That’s a dictatorship, asshole," Carlson added. "Like what do you think that is?" |
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