Contagion at STRANGE TIMES

Contagion

Published

patrickm

on May 26, 2023

in Uncategorized

. 26 Comments

Social contagion is rife! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbuGMbqjsSw

26 Responses to “Contagion”

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1 patrickm
May 26, 2023 at 3:03 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1oh4dsbsb4 well said!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUFaIjVzq2g and well known yet the woke have let this rip as they have the carbon religion! Even pulling your kids out of their rotten schools can’t stop the social media doing the damage that it does!
Look at the data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdBfHwzDYLg
2 patrickm
May 27, 2023 at 11:55 am

How true (but cancel and silence has always been the pseudo left stand) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC-SdRzRJuU Jordan Peterson The Demise of the Left: from Liberalism to Marxism | Naomi Wolf | EP 351
3 patrickm
June 1, 2023 at 1:21 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKRuvKtFvqo “Uniquely Stupid:” Dissecting the Past Decade of American Life | Amanpour and Company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pefVM0aOfw useful lecture. UBC Phil Lind Initiative 2023 Presents: Jonathan Haidt
4 patrickm
June 16, 2023 at 9:54 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKamM_MrYGc a useful discussion of Human flourishing etc
Jun 15, 2023
From Alex Epstein: “Recently I was having dinner with Peter Thiel (the billionaire investor/entrepreneur who founded PayPal and Palantir) and he raised some interesting challenges to my book Fossil Future (which he has enthusiastically endorsed). I suggested, ‘Let’s record a discussion where you give me all your challenges to Fossil Future and I try to answer them.’ Peter loved the idea, so we made it happen—recording a 90-minute discussion at his office in West Hollywood.

“We also ended up covering many other issues (sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing) including:
* Ayn Rand
* Nuclear energy
* Why we both oppose the “Effective Altruism” movement
* What we can learn from Elon Musk about how to create a vision
* My strategy for Energy Talking Points
* How to create political change”

“I hope people enjoy this unique discussion. It isn’t an interview or a debate or a panel, it’s a genuine discussion, including some spirited arguments—that almost exactly resembles how Peter and I discuss and argue when there is no camera.”
5 patrickm
June 17, 2023 at 12:28 pm

Winter has just begun in Adelaide and I have never been so cold! Bring on some warming!

Note the You Tube Context warning! Fucking hell…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Uf_AbyG6ho
138. Climate physics w/ Professor William Happer
Oct 30, 2022 The Bitcoin Standard Podcast
Princeton Professor Emeritus in Physics, William Happer, joins us to discuss the impact of CO2 on the Earth’s climate and the state of modern science. What is the scientific evidence on the relationship between CO2 and Earth’s climate? Does CO2 drive the Earth’s temperature, or does temperature drive CO2? What does the fossil record tell us about the state of the world’s climate in the past? Is current warming unprecedented? Why don’t scientists study the evidence of prehistoric forests in the Arctic, and what it implies for historical temperatures? Why is there little focus on the enormous benefits of CO2? What is the evidence for CO2 driving ocean acidification? How much better are scientists today from the scientists involved in the Salem witch hunt? How does politicization affect science, and why does Professor Happer think that the more policy-driven a field is, the less trustworthy its conclusions are?

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o8VKQ9LJHI Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive” don’t mess with Mr. In-Between ).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOKElp_jGLQ&t=116s 2018 Annual GWPF Lecture Prof Richard Lindzen Global Warming For The Two Cultures The narrative of global warming is intrinsically implausible if not absurd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttNg1F7T0Y0 John Christy on The Economics and Politics of Climate Change Dec 2, 2015
As part of Uncomfortable Learning at Williams, Prof. John Christy gave a talk entitled “The Economics and Politics of Climate Change”

And yet the hysterics goes on and on! Green policies that will be pushed on Ukraine by the woke will kill people!

Cost benefit analysis by Lomborg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YtxH71xhiA Dec 1, 2022 #PurdueUniversity #PurduePresidentialLectureSeries #PurdueAlumni
Danish author Bjørn Lomborg, former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute and think tank president at Copenhagen Consensus Center, starts with optimism. He says things are generally getting better, not worse, and talks about where we can put our efforts and do the most good in an era of climate change.
6 patrickm
June 17, 2023 at 5:35 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIXncWdwS-s The Great Renewable Energy Con explained by Dr Benny Peiser.
7 patrickm
July 3, 2023 at 7:31 am

Oh dear! The rot that jumps out about Iraq! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9myuuwMnRI
Philosopher Susan Neiman talks to Brendan O’Neill about her new book, Left Is Not Woke. Susan and Brendan discuss the woke’s abandonment of progress, the rebirth of racial tribalism and the dangers of valorising victimhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT4hPJ9sHGc
Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko and Apocalypse Never, talks to Brendan O’Neill about the fightback against the green elites.

But he is nowhere near as good as Alex Epstein! A mixed bag! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4XVyHRg0eQ
8 patrickm
July 4, 2023 at 11:30 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJGJOC70o9I
Lee Fang is an independent journalist formally at the Intercept. He discusses his forced apology for how he covered the 2020 BLM protests, how and why media and journalists collude as part of the censorship industrial complex, what he discovered during the Twitter Files investigations and FBI surveillance.

**************
These issues are IMV almost sleeping giants. Worth keeping up with. Here is one step back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4XyIA3XqS8

Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files journalist and founder of Public is in London to discuss the international censorship industrial complex. He explains to Winston how the complex web of government, big tech, intelligence and media collude to suppress speech in the UK, America and beyond.

Michael will be continuing the debate on the censorship industrial complex with Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi on Thursday 22nd June at Central Hall, Westminster.
9 steve owens
July 16, 2023 at 10:31 am

I’ll keep it short. Why did Mao rehabilitate Deng and place him back on the CC. The whole cultural revolution was aimed at Lui and Deng. Lui suffered an unfortunate death in custody and Deng got rehabilitated.
10 steve owens
July 16, 2023 at 10:33 am

OK maybe it was just that thread. It would not take this most recent post.
11 steve owens
July 16, 2023 at 2:19 pm

I mean Deng didn’t just get a rehab he went back on the Politburo as Vice Premier He at the time was the number one target of the Cultural Revolution.
The official line makes no sense. Its like the Lin Biao affair it makes no sense. Mao’s chosen successor takes off in a plane at midnight and they close every airport in China and turn off every landing light.
Had to post here post failed again at other thread
12 patrickm
July 16, 2023 at 2:36 pm

Obviously the old saying gives us the commonsense explanation with the advice to ‘keep your friends close but your enemies even closer’. But I have no deeper thoughts on this rather bizarre question. After all ‘rehabilitated’ is not much more than a required diplomatic word to permit the leading enemy to remain close enough to keep that enemy under ‘observation’.

I would also say that death is not an uncommon outcome in a poor country where the ordinary health care for peasants was at the level where the barefoot doctor was the best that could be done for hundreds of millions of peasants and workers. And we only have the enemy explanation as to what actually happened in this particular case.

The one clear point is that the leadership that was under attack for wanting to take the capitalist road were guilty as charged because they did exactly that and the line from Mao that they would institute a fascist regime has also been demonstrated by reality! They had to lie while doing all of this and so as Arthur said ‘their basic dishonesty precludes them from being taken seriously’ ever after. Yet you appear to, or alternatively condemn both as if the Chiang Kai-shek alternative was not an alternative fascist regime that required a revolutionary overthrow, and we are left in a Trot LA LA land! Much like the fool at the Melbourne event that spoke up about ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in Ukraine!
13 steve Owens
July 16, 2023 at 4:32 pm

Oh please they had him under close observation as he repaired tractors. Mao allowed him to return to the Politburo as a Deputy Vice Premier. Yes peasants received health care but not on the level that high party members received. The only evidence I have that Lui died of medical neglect was that’s what Bill Brugger told me. He was a leading China expert was in China during the Cultural Revolution and was sympathetic to its aims. I don’t rely on the “enemy” for explanations.
14 patrickm
July 16, 2023 at 8:00 pm

That is not what is meant by close observation!! Try to think what it might mean in context. Prisoners are under close observation but do not conduct political leadership actions that require countering. These enemies from within are already talking the talk but they do not walk the walk. They are communist by day and capitalist-roader by night. Where these oppositional forces put their effort and where they are stronger and weaker etc is all ‘observation’.

No good to pretend that the line you have is not the enemy line when it clearly is no matter WHO it was that is conveying that line to you! Brugger may have got it from Deng himself but he got it from someone because he was not there at the time! So it is from someone else and it iS what the enemy says!

He could choose to believe this line but it was then and is now a choice just like you are making in the face of the evidence that the capitalist-roaders basic dishonesty precluded them from being taken seriously about stuff we can deduce! We cannot deduce anything about that death and so this is pointless.

Those in charge right now in China are the direct connection to that capitalist roading leadership and are the enemy of all democrats and that is not requiring any “…”

That leadership is the enemy! Genuine democrats are open honest and above board and thus on the side of the Chinese masses and the revolution led by Mao!
15 steve owens
July 17, 2023 at 3:56 am

You being a student of Chinese politics must realize that Mao’s elevation of Deng to the Central Committee meant that the Gang of 4 were unable to criticize Deng by name.
My point is that the Maoist narrative about China doesn’t make sense.
You can’t be fighting capitalist restoration if you are promoting the leading capitalist to a position from which he can’t be criticized by name.
16 steve owens
July 17, 2023 at 9:20 am

You must be aware that Mao’s elevation of Deng to deputy vice premier made Deng third in line to become chairman. The line of succession went Mao-Zhou-Deng. We only didn’t get this because when Zhou died first he was replaced by Hua Guofeng rather than Deng. If Mao had died first then the succession would have gone Zhou- Deng. Tell me again how Mao was against the rise of Deng.
17 patrickm
July 17, 2023 at 3:36 pm

Looks like you’re having it both ways yet again.

Either Mao was or was not the leader of the cultural revolution. I think he was at the start of it, and you think that as well. But even the formal start was not so for him. He was in constant struggle including internationally for example the events of 1956 when we were born and right through with all the ups and downs successes AND failures! Only people who do nothing never fail. When 10 years of struggle later 1966 erupted he was 73 (7 years older than we are currently). He was then only 10years from death at 82. his situation in the early 60ies was however very low because of the Great leap forward difficulties and the capitalist roaders captured many positions of great influence in this country that contained 1/4 of all humanity. Mao grew older as the GPCR went along over more than a decade until he died in an obviously feeble condition.

The GPCR was correctly directed against those in power taking the capitalist road and we know Mao was against Deng when we know all his faculties were functioning. If he lost his marbles towards the end of his life (and many of us do as we can see with Joe what’s my name Biden) then anything is possible and we can’t reason it out because it is an issue beyond reason. Your experience in the psychiatric field ensures that you are fully aware of these limitations and you have no excuse for not allowing for these quite common age-related disorders irrespective of what the reality is in any particular case. All these cases are simply and obviously just beyond our knowledge.

In short it is not important what people do in their last days or last few years -it’s not as if they are gods that never grow old and feeble or never make mistakes or any other human twist. Logic can tell us who were the genuine communists and who were the capitalist roaders. What is important is that you are trying to hide from this. You are now and have been a supporter of the ‘moderates’ against the ‘mad Maoists’ that is, a Deng supporter (until he drove the tanks over the heads of the students in Tiananmen Square) when he lost his moderate status!

Communists and other democrats have no option but to unite with and also fight for their very lives against the likes of Chiang Kai-shek / Lui / Deng / Xi Jin Ping and that is what Mao did all his long life.

The people that run China now are some variant of fascist owners! They have massive wealth at their disposal and the working peoples that have nothing but their labor power to sell will require a revolution to overthrow them. They will do far better at the task if they read Mao and draw appropriate lessons from his life’s work.
18 Steve
July 17, 2023 at 4:54 pm

I just don’t think that we in Australia have much more than a superficial understanding of Chinese politics. I don’t claim to stand with any of the factions but what is clear is that the party divided between the leftists like Lin Biao and the gang of 4 and the rightist Liu, Deng and Zhou. The gang had a power base in the Red Guards Lin in the PLA and the rightists in the party bureaucracy. Mao encouraged and discouraged these factions in turn. He did lead the GPCR but when Red guards of different stripes started using military grade weapons against each other he disbanded them. When he decided that Lin needed to be in an airplane that was destined to fall from the sky he waged an extensive purge of the PLA. In the end he reconciled with the right faction. He made Zhou his successor and had Deng rehabilitated. Mao attacked the right then he attacked the left then he reconciled with the right. He protected Zhou he carried out rightist policies like restoring relations with the USA which is an act of extreme irony considering that he broke with the Soviet Union on their theory of peaceful coexistence.
Its your absolute right to think that the gang of 4 were the ants pants but history records that Mao was more a rightist than a leftist. He was prone to mad cap adventurism (Lysenkoism, backyard steel production, death to sparrows campaign, Great Leap, GPCR,) after each of these failures he reconciled with the right and got them to sort stuff out.
The USSR after 1927 and China post revolution were dictatorships with superstar leaders. They did some stuff I agree with (collectivisation and defeat of fascism) but I don’t think that their models of totalitarianism offer much to us in the West.
19 patrickm
July 18, 2023 at 9:42 am

It’s clear to me that you have a dog’s breakfast of thinking on display above.

For example, describing the GPCR as ‘mad cap adventurism’ is just par for your course! Yet a failure to launch a revolutionary movement at that time would just be a case of handing power over without a fight. In the same manner that you shrugged your shoulders over Ukrine in 2014-15.

In China only 10 years later the enemy staged a coup and grabbed total power BUT they had to do so while claming to be defending the cultural revolution! They had to point blank lie and conceal what they were doing till several years of consolidating their power had passed and they could finally wield their -life and death- power with impunity as they do to this day.

No revolution is without flaws -nor is the struggle in Ukraine- so the chinese youth in making this new revolution were bound to make plenty of errors and take many foolish misteps down dead end paths but that is not what you are getting at. The capitalist roaders would have simply been in unchallenged power all the sooner without the GOCR and you know it! What is more you in reality are trapped into revealing your support for those who later turn out to be counter revolutionaries justly charged!

This Chinese defense of the proletarian revolution that communists were making prematurely because the bourgeois was too flabby to undertake the struggle against imperialism, feudalism and fascism was dragging in 1/4 of humanity and a very backward section that was still caught up in the struggle against feudalist thinking, Confucius thinking, ancestor worship, appalling educational levels, back breaking toil for the vast masses both in the agricultural sector and also in any industrial sectors and so on; so I am not the slightest bit surprised that eventually a new bourgeois gained total power and instituted their current ongoing reign of terror. All that would have happened without the revolutionary resistance would have been the terror would have started sooner and the lying conduct would have been less obvious etc.

Revolution is still required in China!
20 steve owens
July 18, 2023 at 10:10 am

How many times does Socialism in One country have to fail before you realise that it doesn’t work?
21 patrickm
July 18, 2023 at 10:25 am

BTW for many decades everyone I have been associated with that has had any Maoist background has insisted that the masses in any advanced industrialized country neither could or would settle for anything less than a multiparty system of elected governments and so we have had a policy of declaring that in this current period theory is primary for we MLM types have no credible path forward out of whatever is coming down the pipeline of modern capitalism.

We few theorists have avoided having anything to do with sects other than to confront and expose them. (Like the loons in the RCP USA or the various Trot loons right round the globe). We have thus expressed fulsome support for the democratic revolution especially it’s illegal overthrow of fascists! I point to South Africa and Iraq that NOW have the same electoral systems and plenty of problems to get on with. But at least the horror of stability is ‘gone with the wind’.

Portugal will next ANZAC day celebrate 50years since military officers overthrew the fascist Junta! Consider the silly east European police state that the Trots wanted back then! Speak of it no more, research it not, for it is too embarrassing to contemplate!

Consider how those same trots and liberals sold out the Egyptian democratic revolution. Any democracy in the MENA must see Islamists come to power as Turkey is demonstrating with of course almost total opposition to the democratic leader Erdogan from all good western liberals and trots. Like Tony Abbott, you have no fucking clue or solution to the problems of backward peoples making democratic revolution, so you go weak at the knees over your support for the Libyan revolution!

All quite pathetic really.

Then consider the role of the Maoist revolutionaries in Nepal and take heart!
22 patrickm
July 18, 2023 at 10:30 am

The day a chain breaks in every link at the same moment will be NEVER!
23 steve owens
July 18, 2023 at 10:42 am

Problem with SIOC is that you have to establish primitive accumulation with carrots or sticks and you have zero carrots.
24 patrickm
July 18, 2023 at 11:46 am

What happens when the world has a huge accumulation of productive capital but capitalism stands in the way of its productive use?
25 patrickm
July 18, 2023 at 12:39 pm

It would seem that 1/4 of the way through the 21st Century a clear field is open to the worlds capitalists to solve all the problems associated with any number of problems like ‘primitive accumulation’ in places like Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Central and South America. Yet the carrots are not abundant enough to stop the endless flow of economic refugees AND the multitude of freedom seeking political refugees are still avoiding the sticks that are liberally used throughout these regions. Masses of refugees find life under all manner of capitalist regimes intolerable and flow just as often as the barrel bombs drop.

Our various capitalist classes also seem quite capable of stepping out of whatever they have current control of like Russia or China to go empire building! South China sea, or Georgia / Ukraine spring to mind. These knuckle draggers still haven’t got the memo that imperialism is not even possible in the modern world! They make war and so defensive actions and revolutionary war is the result.

Iran, Myanmar, Afghanistan, North Korea, Egypt, Syria etc are still generating the familiar ‘imperialists’ that have been their leading examples for the last couple of centuries. But they have no way forward because they have no carrots just plenty of sticks!

Many pseudo-leftists still carry on with ‘revolutionary defeatism’ when the clear issue is summed up by Lenin’s firm WW1 stand that ‘if the war was about Belgium, then we would support it!’ Well, the war is about Ukraine, and yet these ‘Leninists’ have not the sense to support it’. Just like when the war was about Kuwait! In a particularly sad example you came up with a cost benefit analysis for the Falkland Islands and decided that the Fascist Argentinian Junta taking charge was preferable to democrats fighting about it!!

Instead of picking up the proffered carrots, the dispossessed masses head to the poverty and uncertainty of a desperate life on the road trying to get lucky and grab a foothold of existence in the western industrially developed countries. That indicates there are not many carrots within the capitalist framework of the less developed regions of the world.

Some of these carrot-less peoples form up as people’s armies to resist the Assad types often under the protection of democrats like Erdogan with the clear intent of returning to take charge of their own countries like the FSA is doing and will do and like the Kurds had to when Turkey was not a democracy.

No capitalist class has an answer, and the western woke types like Obama and Merkel just jabber about the weather while they occupy the stage!

Proletarians are going to have to solve more than a few issues that capitalism can’t or perhaps won’t solve.
26 steve Owens
July 20, 2023 at 12:06 pm

“BTW for many decades everyone I have been associated with that has had any Maoist background has insisted that the masses in any advanced industrialized country neither could or would settle for anything less than a multiparty system of elected governments…”
I mean you must see the funny side of this. Leninism has stood for many things. Dictatorship of the proletariat, the Vanguard party, revolutionary defeatism, overthrowing universal suffrage, total censorship. Is democracy only for those in advanced countries?
If there was a revolution in an “advanced” country it would be in a society in ruins it would be a close run thing, and it would be as authoritarian as need be just like in Russia.
PS my posting issue is at my end