Our Position with Regard to Freedom of Speech
At the historical juncture at which Planet Earth stands in 2020-2021, the threat to free speech has become pervasively universal. The overwhelming majority of all the attempts to ban and criminalize free speech and to 'de-platform' and 'shadowban' its defenders -- whether those attempts are driven by social media, interest groups or institutions and legal systems -- are purely totalitarian. They are a form of overt (not even 'hybrid' any more, but simply overt and pre-kinetic) political and ideological warfare and of engineered repression. They are totalitarian, no matter how much they might masquerade under ostensibly well-meaning labels dripping with unctuous self-declared 'goodness'. They are totalitarian, no matter how much they might pose as a 'new normal' that is necessary and utterly 'inevitable' in order to serve collective 'well-being', 'salvation', 'public safety', 'stability and unity', 'safe space', 'keeping the public safe', etc. They are totalitarian, no matter how much the law might authorize and 'justify' them. Legislation can only mask the intrinsic nature of repression -- it cannot render represssive systems any less repressive. The only thing that becomes self-evident is that the relevant laws as such are totalitarian, by their very nature. The totalitarian instinct and mindset underpins for instance even the pathetically disingenous selective bans -- purportedly "to keep people safe" (from themselves, presumably, because they are clearly deemed not to be 'aware enough' or 'educated enough') -- that involve forcefully suppressing any open-forum discussions of nothing more 'perniciously dangerous' than widely known aspects of openly accessible testimonies that are a matter of public record and have already been officially delivered -- oh, the paradox and hypocrisy! -- before branches of the people's own government.

A virtually permanent 'State of Exception' that is loudly declared to be a 'new normal' is always a curiously ominous societal waning sign, especially when it is maintained with ferociously single-minded support from politically servile uni-think mainstream media and buttressed by a myriad ideological pressures from lavishly funded cloud coalitions of utterly intransigent neo-tribal interest groups. To wit: “... in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that was induced by the same governments that now 'intervene' to satisfy it." (Giorgio Argamben)

“We have absolutely no reason to believe that the government agencies that are eager to expand their power in response to [a crisis] will be willing to see those authorities lapse once the [crisis ends].” (Albert Fox Cahn)

"Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.” (Alan Moore)

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population ... who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World)

"People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them. The expert, therefore, must advise first upon the form of action desirable for his client and secondly must utilize the established mediums of communication, in order to present to the public a point of view. This is true whether it is that of a majority or minority, old or new personality, institution or group which desires to change by modification or intensification the store of knowledge and the opinion of the public.” (Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1925) [NB: How to sell lies and pure baloney, masquerading as 'science' and 'truth' and 'facts' and 'what you must know' and that about which you must 'educate yourself' and all that stale truckload of 'authoritative check mark fact-checked "reality" ', in several easy steps -- fine premium 1925 vintage.]

“It’s not about food. It’s about keeping those ants in line!” (A Bug's Life)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." (François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire)

“When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.” (C. S. Lewis)

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. One you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." (Carl Sagan)

“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith [i.e. 'you must believe it like it's religion'] the one unpardonable sin.” (Thomas Huxley)

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (Viktor Frankl)

"[W]henever a government got its hands on truth control, it has massively abused it within a very short time to gag and ban critical and oppositional voices. Once they have the power to control opinion, it is a massive temptation for those in power to use it in the self-interest of a government." (Andreas Unterberger) [NB: Very ominous, especially when a "Ministry of Truth" is put in place that is not even staffed by any full-fledged 'Organs of Power and Order' but by mere cabbage-raw Police Cadets. Just remember: 'a cow remains a cow even if it is called a sheep' (also see below, under "point at deer, say 'horse'"). ]

“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world.” (Edward Snowden)

"Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it." (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited)

"Question: 'What should I track in order to develop self-reliant, rational, and truly critical and expert (not as in 'critique') thinking reflexes?' Answer: There is a virtually perfect guide, updated daily or more often (hourly). Just track everything that has been identified on Facebook or YouTube, etc., as ' 'i' 'False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers. See why,' and/or everything that is banned on FaceBook and/or Twitter, etc. The principle is exactly the same and just as impeccably practical as it once was in the former USSR or 'Democratic' Eastern Europe (pre-1989) -- the Police and Government and Party lists of what was forbidden constituted an excellent initial guide to literature that would put some real spine and vigour and precision and true individualism and undaunted courage into your thought. Same, even earlier on, with the Inquisition's Index. Simply read what is reviled and deprecated by the so-called Independent Fact-checkers, 'trusted sources', and 'authoritative voices'. Compare, collate, check and re-check, and process data-streams on your own, look keenly for flaws and inconsistencies, be alert to all nuances, always apply the nullius in verba principle. Make up your own mind, always. Train and educate yourself genuinely -- not in the deceptive 'Please, educate yourself!' slogan sense, which really means 'Please, indoctrinate yourself and follow the Party Line in every single respect!' " (No One in Particular)

This is the Central Scrutinizer ...
It is my responsibility to enforce all the laws
That haven't been passed yet
It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of you
To the potential consequences
Of various ordinary everyday activities
You might be performing which could eventually lead to
The Death Penalty ...
Our studies have shown that this horrible force
Is so dangerous to society at large
That laws are being drawn up at this very moment
To stop it -- FOREVER!
Cruel and inhuman punishments are being carefully described
In tiny paragraphs
So they won't conflict with the Constitution ...
Which, itself, is being modified in order to accommodate
THE FUTURE! (Frank Zappa)
[NB: Presumably a Future that Sings, Just Sings!]

What do we hold to be an outright Ideological Abuse of Power?
(a) any content- and viewpoint-based discrimination that explicitly or implicitly aims to impose uniformity of thought, interpretation, and expression (i.e. 'compelled speech') is a gross abuse of power and a totalitarian tool of intellectual Gleichschaltung that evokes ominous historical precedents.
(b) content and viewpoint and speech discrimination that actively seeks to suppress or demonstratively single out and punish specific, entirely legitimate, and fact- or evidence-based divergent viewpoints -- instead of encouraging growth and dialogue -- is a gross abuse of power and a totalitarian imposition of intellectual Gleichschaltung that evokes ominous historical precedents.
(c) ideologically motivated or ideologically contextualized dismissal, demotion or denial of employment or otherwise justified promotion -- whether the ideological factor is explicit or implicit or disingenously denied post factum -- is a gross abuse of power and a totalitarian imposition of intellectual Gleichschaltung that evokes ominous historical precedents (especially if the ideologically selected targets' only fault are alleged 'failures to comply' with or to 'embrace' ideological tenets and principles that are being imposed peremptorily and that blatantly have nothing at all to do with the professional standards and competence of the targeted person(s)).
(d) ideologically motivated or ideologically contextualized distortion of a peer review process and 'denial of publication' on ideological grounds (such as purported lack of 'compliance' with a specific ideological faction's preferred or globally imposed Narrative) is a gross abuse of power and an overtly totalitarian imposition of tyrannical intellectual Gleichschaltung that evokes ominous historical precedents.

The phenomena evoked in the opening paragraphs of this page are purely totalitarian no matter how dense the barrage of various claims that data -- and the process of gathering and debating data freely and openly -- might purportedly obscure 'reality' ['reality', you see -- according to some proponents -- must be carefully interpreted and filtered and managed and distorted and 'reframed' : i.e. it cannot be just be left to those who are not Party-card carrying 'authorized interpreters' and 'gatekeepers' with a proven track record of staunch loyalty to a specific Narrative or Movement]. Yes, unfiltered data might be contentious. What truly obscures 'reality', however, is any a priori and targeted suppression of data or even 'listed' terms and expressions, by high-handed fiat, just because someone somewhere deems the material inconvenient on ideological grounds. Just because someone deems those data "a distraction" from The Program they are tyring to impose. Richard Feynman was entirely correct when he insisted thet it is the responsibility of a scientist (and of any self-respecting scholar) to examine and present all the data available, whether or not the data happens to support the point being made. Incidentally, it is not really all that difficult to go beyond Donald D. Hoffman and his 2019 'Case against Reality' study, either intellectually or computationally. For this doggedly realist advocacy on behalf of free speech, we probably ought to be banned from Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Except, oops ... well ... we do not have any Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube account and we never will have one. And we severed our 'partner' links with Google long ago. Deliberately. Very simply, #iwantfreedomofspeech.

We are really not interested in whatever policies 'social media' firms, under pressure from the world's governments and judiciary and ideologists, may put in place with regard to so-called 'permitted' research, 'permitted' data, 'permitted' words, 'permitted' thoughts, permitted 'views', etc. -- except as a source of useful and revealing research data for the study of emergent techno-totalitarian censorship patterns and as a source of tactical data for securing the future of independent and broad-spectrum global digital toolkits to bypass and defeat/subvert censorship and thought-control. [NB: 'Shadowbanning', as we all know all too well, has been officially declared not to exist, a mere 'conspiracy theory', while all the methods that quintessentially define the process of social media 'shadowbanning' have in fact been patented, and the patent approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on 16 July 2019: a patent (processually going back to 2015) for an automated control system that would “receive a list of proscribed content and block comments containing the proscribed content by reducing the distribution of those comments to other viewing users” while still continuing to “display the blocked content to the commenting user such that the commenting user is not made aware that his or her comment was blocked.” I.e. a patented subterfuge and deception mechanism. Interesting, so very interesting. You still think you live in a 'free' and 'just' and 'equitable' society? Think again -- doubt and re-evaluate -- question ALL things: left, right and centre, at all times. Be a rational and superbly educated doubter, a 'denier' ]

A very large part of actual content on any so-called social media 'platform' happens to be freely created by 'participants', who are driven by various hopes and dreams -- social interaction, partisan agendas, clubbishness, neo-tribalist identity politics, communication for the sake of communication, advertising revenue, monetization, scamming, etc. Take your pick. The 'platforms' are de facto, functionally, a mere intermediary, no more than a facilitator (even though by now various Judges strenuously disagree with this interpretation, for a good reason). Or, at least until recently, the 'platforms' have always insisted that they are not bona fide curating publishers but mere mediators offering a forum open to the public: just like those who build a mall, a covered market, or a Greek stoa -- simply, any other space mostly open to the public -- or those who own a blank billboard in the hope that someone will eventually want to advertise something there. But the 'facilitators' have by now overtly become explicit ideological gatekeepers. Once you maintain "search blacklists" and "trends blacklists", while officially and for the record implying that you do no such thing, and then get demonstrably caught in flagranti delicto-- for everyone and their pet cat to see -- the game is up. Circuit Court of Appeal judges have thus been moved to argue accordingly -- the digital stoa remains a strictly private and restricted space -- "[a] public-facing [sic] platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum" (Margaret McKeown). Or "merely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function". Similarly, Google has allegedly argued in its internal memos that it is necessary -- from this point forward -- to abandon any tradition of free speech. Thus -- presumably and by inference -- every single item and snippet of sources, resources, or research data that Google, for instance, mediates or makes available is in fact private and restricted property, and access to it or to any portion thereof can be curtailed at any time on grounds that the material is causing some sort of "harm". This presumably also -- by extension and inference -- encompasses the entire scanned and written or printed heritage of the whole of humanity (i.e. of Planet Earth as such) stored on Google servers. Should this heritage -- or any portion thereof -- be deemed or declared "harmful" by administrative decree, subject to the whims of any fleeting political and ideological tyranny, access to the heritage can be universally blocked. This is a dynamic mind- and research-control scenario that reaches far, far beyond anything that Orwell could possibly have imagined in his Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” (Frank Zappa)

"When a system or an ideology cannot withstand any sort of questioning, refuses to countenance it in the slightest, and institutes systematic 'banning' and censorship and speech control, this suggests that the system or ideology has become utterly corrupt. It rests upon inherently shaky foundations. It is riddled with contradictions, is very keenly aware of that very fact, and has begun to panic about the unravelling of imposed lies piled upon imposed lies. One can try to maintain the status quo by brute force, laws, injunctions, surveillance, policing, and ultimately a pervasive 24/7/365 repression, but the costs of such actions will keep rising to a point where continued 'enforcement' simply is not sustainable. The years 1989-1991, in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, showed that a relentless hypocrisy and blatant double standards behind the ostensible 'values' of an Ideology cannot be maintained 'forever' against the will of the people and against their inherent instinct to live and prosper. Even turning the whole of society into one vast CCTV, drone, and IR-sensor panopticon 'labour camp' will not achieve the goals." (No One in Particular)

What is 'misinformation'? "... misinformation is simply the information they don’t want you to hear." (Mac Slavo) [NB: And as a result you will suffer the most terrible fate -- you will be blacklisted by Facebook, forever. Permanent ban. Quite frankly, tell us, honestly, which rational and thinking and stalwart and independently reasoning and highly educated and qualified human needs something like Facebook? Really. You genuinely need that sheer waste of time and web-space? You really want to spend all the time and resources it takes to build a so-called following on a 'social media' platform, only to see all that work turned against you, holding you ideologically hostage? You really want to become a captive of the equation Work = Dependency? The more hours you spend to 'build your profile' only makes you fatally dependent on a given 'platform', and the more dependent you are the more power the self-annointed string-pullers and two-bit censors of righteous social engineering have over you. So sad! Go rather and read some books. As we are constantly being told: "Please, educate yourself". But educate yourself genuinely. Not in the sense this platitude is being bandied around all the time. Educate yourself in independent rational all-around critical non-faddish non-compliant cutting-edge thought. Educate yourself in what the Facebook Matrix and its handlers fear the most.]

"Who fact checks the 'fact checkers'?" [NB: Ahhh, such a saucy, impertinent question. Already the Roman satirist Juvenal asked it: “Quis custodet ipsos custodes?”]

"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” (George R. R. Martin) [NB: A lesson that Twitter still has to become aware of. The time will come when Twitter will be thought of as the most detested and useless 'platform' on Planet Earth.]

"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda." (Hannah Arendt)

The Ideologically and Politically Managed 'Expertism' Trap: Societies become trapped in false 'expertism' whenever they begin to loudly proclaim that they follow Experts and believe in The Science while at the same time making it obvious that only the experts who are compliant with a pre-scripted core ideological message are welcome to speak and to publish and that any other expert -- no matter how senior, and superbly qualified, and impeccably credentialled, and endowed with ample experience -- should just 'shut their mouth', 'keep in their own traffic lane', 'educate themselves', stop being 'dangerous' and 'oppressive' and 'disturbing', etc. It is interesting to note that the 'trusted' check-mark experts ever so often turn out to represent a limited, even a very small, subset of scientific opinion -- yet, contrary to every known scientific principle, no one is permitted to contradict them. Either the State, an Ideology, the 'social media', the media at large, a coalition of varied 'allied' pressure lobbies, etc., expressly forbid such questioning or overtly and covertly discourage it, ultimately by means of censorship and of existential and legal sanctions. What you are thus looking at is not at all a 'level playing field' or a 'collegial community' or a 'free marketplace of ideas' in any conceivable sense. It is an artificial, legally sanctioned Ideological Monopoly, wielded by those who have declared political allegiance to that which has been declared 'Correct'. This has nothing to do with real scholarship. (No One in Particular)

We see thus absolutely no benefit in supplying, for free, to be stored on any part of what has been judicially declared "[a] public-facing [sic] platform [that] remains a private forum" what we and our authors have created, nursed, edited again and again, disputed, debated, corrected, formatted, produced, shaped, brought into print, and nudged along in order to make it a viable and tangible object. Why should we labour only to generate direct or indirect value and conjoined revenue for absentee uber-billionaire 'gatekeepers' (the owners of the digital stoa) by feeding interesting and variegated 'content' into their 'artificial planet Earth stoa' digital construct that remains an utterly "private forum"? Why should we suffer the indignity of having the material deleted, censored, or algorithm-constrained by some utterly anonymous corporate 'censor' with unknown qualifications (if any at all) in some undetermined location, for unknown and possibly very ideological reasons? We see no reason to do that. Why exactly should we play along with the Matrix? Why should we feed any data at all to the Matrix? What exactly is the incentive? The digital stoa, pretty and fancy as such, perhaps, would frankly be empty if no one at all used it. How much would then 'services' like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. be worth? Realistically, nothing at all. They namely intrinsically 'produce' nothing at all of any value. They -- as such -- create no original or substantive content of any sort. And now they want to be the hidden arbiters of the planet's socio-economic future? This is pure 'bamboozle' and charlatanism, in the sense Carl Sagan defined it

"... The problem [with all social credit digital ranking systems tied into mass ideologically driven systemic surveillance] is the definition of ‘good’: For companies ‘good’ might imply people who are recurring customers, who buy too much and spend too much. For governments ‘good’ might mean people who follow the rules and don’t speak up. Ever. No matter what the government decides ... Any social credit system — be it private or public — undermines freedom of speech." (Tutanota) [NB: Ultimately any such system erodes and then destroys core capacities to think and search and argue outside of an ideologically bounded and also legally mandated straitjacket. Which makes it only more poignantly paradoxical that 'Progressives' happen to be the ones who now ferociously push for 'social-credit-style' surveillance systems and for censorship of speech, research, teaching, writing, and publishing. For a mass suppression of anything that counters a particular worldview. For a 'conversation' that effectively ends all "conversations" other than Party Line ones. "Let's not keep having debates", just a 'conversation' strictly on our terms, so that "you would educate yourself". You do not believe our Party Line talking points? "You are excused from this conversation"! Last time we looked, any sort of 'conversation' involved two or more sides. A 'Conversation' that only one ideology holds with itself simply is NOT a conversation (e.g. "avoid presenting both sides of the argument in the messaging – [for] there’s only one side") -- it is merely a totalitarian monologue (for those unfamiliar with censored Oldspeak Vocabulary, a 'monologue' is a set of utterances in which only one voice is heard [ "there's only one side"], all other voices being officially "excused" or "cancelled", i.e. censored -- it will be very curious to see what the 'mono-dictato-censo- versation' will become under schemas that propose to have a "conversation about changing the conversation" in order to "reinvent / reimage / reframe the Narrative").

A capacity to think freely, individually (as opposed to Court-ordered group-think), and beyond an Arc of The Universe (Supreme Hubris) Party Line sandbox, is vital for dynamic social evolution. 'Social credit' systems as a bureaucratic tool of purported behavioural engineering thus effectively destroy society, by sealing it in a centrally and technocratically managed 'approved stasis' ('happiness' and 'fulfillment' through unquestioning loyalty to a mandatory mindset), and they entrench in power an entitled, preternaturally corrupt, tribalist, clannish, nepotistic, office-politicking and ultimately perennially bungling and self-serving 'priestly caste' of social technocrats whose only aim is to perpetuate their own dominant role by inventing and imposing dysfunctional rules and vocabularies. A 'priestly caste' that does not rule by virtue of any actual and real individual ability, but only by virtue of an 'origin' from ideologically and politically 'correct' selection pools and by virtue of being monotonously 'on-message'.]

"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.” (Thomas Jefferson)

“I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." (Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science", CalTech commencement address, 1974)

“It is a fact that facts are stubborn things, while statistics are generally more pliable … figures don’t lie, but liars figure. You can torture numbers and they will confess to anything. And statistics mean never having to say you are sorry.” (Rick Kirschner, 2007)

So please go ahead and censor us ... or something, you know. We, you know, do not really care a dime about what you desire to censor or not. And we do not really, you know, care what 'social media' think people ought to think. We are an independent publisher. And we do not owe any obeissance to Mr. Sundar Pichai or any others. We are not bound by any fine-print 'social media user agreements'. Moreover, our 'monetization' does not depend one single iota on any of your 'platforms', software, agreements, terms of service, etc. And absolutely never will. There is no reason at all why we should use any of your 'services' as a middle'person'. Incidentally and as a marginalium, a number of us at the PSR are proud Canadians. So here is our fond salutation to Facebook, as a comment on their banning for instance the word "honk" from their 'platform'. See, Facebook, we love the Canada goose -- it is the flying symbol of our free northern wilderness -- majestic V-formations of "honkers" migrate through Canada's sky twice a year, north and south. And yes, we have goose hunters in Canada (who include many members of our First Nations) and we buy short reed Honky Tonk goose calls in fishing, hunting, and outdoor shops. Yes, we are very 'evil' and un-'aware' and un-'reflexive' that way. Really very Honky! Here is to you, Facebook, as a boisterous greeting from goose-loving Canadians: HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK, HONK ... now go and try to censor and deplatform us for that, eh, or something, eh, you know ... eh? There is no conceivable reason at all why we should play your semantics, in your 'Oh, Semantics' romp pen. In those immortal words that go back to 2001: A Space Odyssey: "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave". Oh, yes, "the rules of the matrix allowed a lot of things" back then that they do not 'allow' today. So -- bottom line -- you admit there is a Matrix? A coercive Matrix? Masks off, finally?

We further hold that 'shutting down' expert scholarly and scientific work not only by social media la-la-land 'deplatforming', but also by means of sheer violence (aka 'the blunt "law" of bullhorn, spray can, baseball bat, and steel rebar') is utterly odious and far beyond the pale. We further hold that all courts of law, judges, lawyers, organizations, managerial entities and others who condone such, or cave in to such, have utterly forfeited ANY conceivable shred of decency and credibility. Why do we hold such a position? Firstly, because many of us are sober historians, well aware that there is no Fukuyamian teleological 'End of History'. Secondly, because we are staunch Humanists. We are committed to humanity, to its advancement and its prosperity. Unlike some (including some of mega-elite status), we simply do NOT view humanity as a virus, an "infection", as a mere herd with respect toi which a "a culling is the only way to ensure that the species survives" (e.g. Kingsman: The Secret Service script). We do not 'embrace' any apocalyptic or redemptively post-apocalyptic social engineering fancies, neither Pournelle-style sci-fi along the lines of approvingly describing mass executions as a master solution to economic and political problems, nor those other-side-of-the-coin Malthusian 'grand' solutions ('Brother' Pol Pot and ideological heirs). We are not Ahuman. Period.

There are no millennarian teleological Thousand-Year Realms. The average pathetic life-span of 'dynasties', regimes, empires, and legislations is rather limited. The average life-span of radical movements even more so, even when they manage to impose Absolute Dictatorship. What you do to some today, will with 100% certainty be done unto you by others, tomorrow. And those denizens of a future as yet unknown to either you or us, and their descendants, all those who will have lived through your ideological tyranny and Secret Speech Police, anonymous delation, and your haughty 'ironic' censorship, may very well decide not to forgive and forget in the least. They may decide to call your ideological bet in full -- and raise it 25%, just for good measure. Ponder that historical possibility, whichever end of the political and ideological spectrum you happen to stand on. "Total Victories" are never 'Total' or For Ever. "Victory Coffee" and "Victory Gin" are Humpty-Dumpty swill. Even 'techno-total' Global Teleological Dictatorships in which Kafka joins Orwell can and will be ultimately overthrown. A Global Archontocracy resting on agit-prop relentlessly purveyed by Directors of Information and Tech Dissemination flanked by Directors of Trust and Safety Councils and resting on 'legal authority' is an illusion. You will never achieve it. Even if you do, for the sake of the argument, your will never, ever manage to hold it more than a few years, even with the help of swarms of drones, face-recognition cameras, and a pervasive Real-ID system. You may well think -- sure, whatever, we shall just indoctrinate all your children and in the end, through that alone, the "future will be ours" -- because there will be no one left to disagree. The Jesuits thought that too. So did World War II Germany and the USSR. You are baying at the Moon ... Yes, yes, inter arma silent musae: but if you make that your sole guiding principle, you fully concede that we already are at war. That, exactly that, is what rationalist historians reflect on, soberly. They do not fear it -- if you think anyone fears you, you are badly mistaken. Why rational historians reflect thus is because the one who is forewarned is the one who more amply prepared.

“All theories are hypotheses; all can be overthrown. The game of science has no end. Those who decide that scientific propositions are final [NB: And who thus plump, unilaterally and in violation of the Method of Multiple Hypotheses, for ‘raising authoritative information' as a knee-jerk reflex -- smugly ignoring the fact that the 'authoritative information' can turn out to be obsolete the very next day or within a matter of hours, depending on the actual flow of research data, preprints, peer review, publication schedules, the politics of research, leaked data, industrial intelligence and counter-intelligence, etc.] retire from the game, leaving behind pseudo-science or faith (Karl Popper)

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” (George Orwell)

“The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” (G.W.F. Hegel, "Preface", The Philosophy of Right [1820])

The new (2021) Social Contract / Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (1762): “They lie to us,we lie to them”. Samizdat!!!!! [NB: "Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend time in prison for it myself." (Vladimir Bukovsky)]

"Controlling The Narrative and reframing The Storytelling and The Conversation is NOT at all the same thing as controlling actual reality. The Narrators should keep this in mind, but they usually are unable and profoundly unwilling to do that. They are governed by vested interest, often to a much higher degree than those whom they accuse of being governed by various other venal vested interests. What is their 'vested interest', the thing that makes them 100% oblivious and zealotic? They have become fatally addicted to their own Narrative and they simply cannot detox. The Narrative 'reframes' the very core of who they deem themselves to be. They cannot decenter even for a moment and look from the outside, dispassionately, at their "this is who we are" constructivist Narrative Bubble. Their very epistemology frequently actively forbids any such decentering and denies the existence of any non-'reframed' reality, which is declared not to exist. George Orwell had identified this ideological mechanism with utter precision. This type of 'total immersion' is arguably more pernicious than many other kinds. It is a very profound emotional and intellectual bondage that engulfs every strand of thought, because the Newspeak that it either requires or imposes or insinuates -- a mandatory Inverted Reality Language, a Neo-Language that fuels (Info)-Emotive -Agit-Crusades [The Struggle] -- is a primary-level censorial filter designed to modulate ALL ambient reality, dictating ALL perceptions and human interactions. This is why a bureaucratic ideologue never bans 'thought or thing XYZ', but always an 'XYZ-like item'. The resulting fluidity is not at all a flaw stemming from lack of insight or knowledge. On the contrary, it is an inbult and key programming feature. It would thus be a waste time to criticize it as a 'flaw'. The intent and scope of a ban governed by the new 'fluidity' can namely be stretched any which way, arbitrarily, and those who are purported to have 'broken the law' can be subjected to endless permutations of a circular Alice in Wonderland (aka Theater of the Absurd) protocol. All bureaucrats, hierocrats, ideologues, Party functionaries or Temple officials of all eras and systems have always found this to be the very wellspring of their power -- the power to twist rules that have been rendered twistable by design. Otherwise, all those petty tyrants would be nothing -- less than chaff in the wind." (No One in Particular)

“Diversity of viewpoint, flat [organizational] structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.” (Tim Trevan) [MB: As opposed to systems and speech control environments where one's hiring, remaining employed, advancement, and opportunity to publish heavily depend-- overtly or covertly -- not on any actual capability but on (a) demonstrative compliance with and utter loyalty to a specific ideology, (b) on the use of a mandatory and purely ideological vocabulary (compelled speech), (c) on loudly 'affirming' and 'embracing' a prescibed worldview that involves concepts commingled with towering hubris about a 'bending of the Arc of the Universe', and (d) on ensuring that the 'findings' of one's research comply, in all respects, with a 'correct' ideological message.]

“A journalist who prevails after trial in a defamation case will still have been required to shoulder all the burdens of difficult litigation and may be faced with hefty attorney’s fees. Those prospects may deter the uninhibited expression of views that would contribute to a healthy public debate.” (Samuel Alito) [NB: Judge Samuel Alito, suprisingly enough for professional 'shut-it-downers' as well as for the Supreme Court, happens to be supported here by none other than Karl Marx: "Censorship, like slavery, can never be rightful, even though it existed a thousand times in the form of laws. ... A censored press is a thing without a backbone, a vampire of slavery, a civilized monstrosity, a scented freak of nature" (Karl Marx, Rheinische Zeitung, 1842-1843). We of course concur, fully, without saying 'yes' or 'no' to either side of any specific argument. We merely defend the fundamental notion of 'even and free speech' protected by law, as oposed to Marcuse and the explicitly and programmatically biased notion of 'repressive tolerance'.]

"According to this law,'namely, Article II, 'the censorship should not prevent serious and modest investigation of truth, nor impose undue constraint on writers, or hinder the book trade from operating freely.' The investigation of truth which should not be prevented by the censorship is more particularly defined as one which is serious and modest. Both these definitions concern not the content of the investigation, but rather something which lies outside its content. From the outset they draw the investigation away from truth and make it pay attention to an unknown third thing. An investigation which continually has its eyes fixed on this third element, to which the law gives a legitimate capriciousness, will it not lose sight of the truth? Is it not the first duty of the seeker after truth to aim directly at the truth, without looking to the right or left? Will I not forget the essence of the matter, if I am obliged not to forget to state it in the prescribed form? Truth is as little modest as light, and towards whom should it be so? Towards itself? Verum index sui et falsi. Therefore, towards falsehood? If modesty is the characteristic feature of the investigation, then it is a sign that truth is feared rather than falsehood. It is a means of discouragement at every step forward I take. It is the imposition on the investigation of a fear of reaching a result, a means of guarding against the truth. Further, truth is general, it does not belong to me alone, it belongs to all, it owns me, I do not own it. My property is the form, which is my spiritual individuality. Le style c'est l'homme. Yes, indeed! The law permits me to write, only I must write in a style that is not mine! I may show my spiritual countenance, but I must first set it in the prescribed folds! What man of honour will not blush at this presumption and not prefer to hide his head under the toga? Under the toga at least one has an inkling of a Jupiter's head. The prescribed folds mean nothing but bonne mine à mauvais jeu." (Karl Marx, "Comments on The Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction," Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik, Bd. I, 1843)

[NB1: It is also well worth pondering the above legislation in the original 1819 version: "Art. 1. Alle im Unserem Lande herauszugebende Bücher und Schriften, sollen der in den nachstehenden Artikeln verordneten Zensur zur Genehmigung vorgelegt, und ohne deren schriftliche Erlaubniß weder gedruckt noch verkauft werden. / Art. 2. Die Zensur wird keine ernsthafte und bescheidene Untersuchung der Wahrheit hindern, noch den Schriftstellern ungebührlichen Zwang auflegen, noch den freien Verkehr des Buchhandels hemmen. Ihr Zweck ist ... [der] Verwirrung der Begriffe entgegen zu arbeiten [NB: 'Management' of concepts and of State-permitted terminology -- i.e. the management of 'compelled speech']; endlich zu verhüten, was die Würde und Sicherheit, sowohl des Preußischen Staats, als der übrigen deutschen Bundesstaaten, verletzt. Hierher gehören alle auf Erschütterung der ... in diesen Staaten bestehenden Verfassungen abzweckende Theorien; jede Verunglimpfung der mit dem Preußischen Staate in freundschaftlicher Verbindung stehenden Regierungen und der sie konstituirenden Personen, ferner alles was dahin zielt im Preußischen Staate, oder den deutschen Bundesstaaten Mißvergnügen zu erregen und gegen bestehende Verordnungen aufzureitzen ... / Art. 4. Die Zensur der Zeitungen, periodischen Blätter und größeren Werke, welche sich ausschließlich oder zum Theil mit der Zeitgeschichte oder Politik beschäftigen, steht unter der obersten Leitung Unsers Ministeriums der auswärtigen Angelegenheiten, die der ... rein wissenschaftlichen Werke, unter dem Ministerium der geistlichen Angelegenheiten und des öffentlichen Unterrichts. Alle übrige Gegenstände der Zensur unter dem Polizei-Departement im Ministerium des Innern." (Preußische Zensur-Verordnung vom 18. Oktober 1819 (Preußische Gesetz-Sammlung 1819, S. 227)).] [NB: Implying of course that a Ministry of the Cult and Public Education low-grade hack or a random Spitzel in the Police Section of the Ministry of the Interior or a faceless member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs permanent bureaucracy is fully qualified to determine what is "True" and "Not True" in scientific terms. The issue is still debated today -- 'Is a legal expert, lawyer, attorney, judge, Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice, sufficiently qualified in all the relevant matters of science, technology, and research in general -- including for instance advanced mathematics or cutting-edge physics or biology or neurology -- to be able to issue a peremptory ruling on what constitutes scholarly and scientific "Truth"? The Roman Inquisition thought so ... We do not think so ... ]

[NB2: Ponder, oh please ponder, the words of Karl Marx before you seek to evict from campus the next speaker whose words you deem you must 'cancel' and 'shut down'. Or are you pure double-standard hypocrites, by any remote chance? Such a shame that Marx can be such a pebble in the shoe when he fails to serve the One Purpose, exclusively ... i.e. an admittedly totalitarian purpose. This way, folks! Back to the Future! Forward to the 1840s, to pre-1848 police-state Prussia, and further back to 1819, the Karlsbader Beschlüsse, etc. ... Now, given that Marx opposed censorship in this particular extract, should we be forced to delete all of the above and also be duly fined and furthermore forced to 'apologize', because the content challenges today's censorship-frenzied 'policies' that require one to delete even impeccably ascertained and broadly known data or well documented statements that indeed were undeniably made, merely on the grounds that some censor somewhere or some Tribunal somewhere deems the facts inconvenient and deems that public knowledge of something that has become public knowledge somehow amounts, entirely ludicrously, to “coordinating harm” and “promoting crime”? An interesting question ... Interesting indeed.]

It is unfortunately not at all rare today to hear milquetoast and quite unconvincing expressions of commitment to civility and to 'common ground' delivered in virtually the same breath with regrets that civility "is hard to do when we start to dispute research, saying that truth is not the truth and fake news and the reality that some of us live in is different than the reality that some of us live in.” A prime manifestation of ideological cognitive rigidity. It is not the act of "disputing research" that constitutes a problem. Au contraire. "Fact-mongering" is very healthy, unlike stale and fruitless dogma. The acts of "disputing research", which some find ever so difficult to tolerate, are the only thing that has moved human knowledge forward throughout millennia. It is the very essence of high -quality and open-minded work. A scholarly 'conversation' might perhaps seek to persuade and convince -- based on data or interpretations that have begun to appear more plausible at a given time. There is a world of difference, however, between that particular approach and 'conversations' that elevate to the status of absolute and undebatable 'truth' a mere socially constructed allegiance to a specific kind of narrative. Purported 'conversations' that spin into high dudgeon when they run out of confirming data and sound arguments, whereupon they demand that all and any critics (especially those who very expertly go to the core of the most glaring flaws in one's ideology) be peremptorily silenced, by the courts and by the State, because if that fails to happen it is "very upsetting" and "very disturbing." And, of course, "if librarians don’t aggressively enforce a book ban, they could face a year in prison." La-la-la-la, ideological Spitzelstaat ... full of "correct-origin" climbers making career.

What we really have here is to a large extent a very ancient problem, a Gnostic problem in essence, wherein for the Gnostic or a de facto intellectual affiliate or heir (no matter how defined) “non-recognition of reality is the first principle” -- i.e. a fundamental and baked-in inability and unwillingness to view the world as it is, to the extent that if data and records happen to disagree with the 'desired' or mandatory narrative, all data must be 'adjusted' and the records purged, altered, or detroyed wholesale. Which brings us straight to 1984. "Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy" (George Orwell) [NB: Inside such a constructivist mindscape, future causes the past, any history that proves inconvenient for the Party Narrative can be counterfactually altered at will, any science that fails to support correct ideology is not 'science' (e.g. only Lysenkoism, or whatever else The Party and its Commissar 'fact-checkers' decree to be 'truth', qualifies as 'science', and The Party is collectively wiser and mightier than any 'science'), everything is infinitely 'reframable' through 'optics' and 'lenses', ideology always 'wags the dog', etc. States of being arise that are "untethered to facts". If The Party orders that any aspect of documented and factual science is merely a philosophical belief, that ideological directive overrides all scientific data and must be complied with, at any and all cost. The Party and its 'cultural cadres' have the power to decree what is 'real'. Facts are never determined in the laboratory or by research. Facts are established only in Committee. All absolute grounding truths are already enshrined in the 'classics of The Party'. 'Democratic centralism' ensures that Party reality is binding on everyone, as the only 'reality' ever. If The Party decrees that grain must be sown into frozen ground, that is 'science'; if it decrees that bears are walruses, all walrus exhibits in museums shall immediately be relabelled 'Arctic bear' and zoology lessons in schools shall be altered correspondingly; if it decrees that a Siberian - 25 C means it is Summer, then you must put on your bathing suit, get frostbite, and loudly shout how sweltering it is. The Party knows everything. It is not permitted to question The Party and its collective wisdom.]

From the above perspective, Humanists and pro-human 'realists' who persevere in pointing out pesky factual and tangible aspects of reality ("being tethered to facts") must of course be viciously tarred as 'ignorant', smeared as 'prejudiced' and not 'enlightened', or outright silenced by force of doxxing, denunciation, and epithet-slinging -- they are "self-hating cowards" and they do not "love their country" [while, however, 'loving your country' is very bad too -- a pure manifestation of "... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them" (1984, Part 2, chap. 9), in other words, whatever The Party and its Messaging Department say is true at any given moment is indeed True at any given moment, while being sophisticatedly 'Relative' at the very same time, and don't you dare say or think or write anything to the contrary.]. Otherwise, the fantasy constructivist 'over-the-rainbow' world of The Blue Checkmark fact-checking is all too easily and readily exposed and crumbles to dust. The curtain is ripped aside and behind it there stands nothing more than a sad-looking 'Wizard' of Oz mannikin. This is why those invested in specific narratives have always deemed it essential to control, 'de-platform', 'shut down', destroy, mock, and silence those who pursue evidence instead of 'feelings', who think and investigate by themselves, without a 'media' guide, a 'spiritual advisor', a Father Confessor, a PolitRuk, or a vigilant KultKom, simply for the sake of reasoned (mindful) (manas (Sanskrit मनस्)) investigating and not for the sake of functioning as a mere obedient servant (servus servorum) to an ideology, an 'engaged' mechanistic cog in a Movement, an agit-prop signal devoid of individual and truly critical manas.

“Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying ‘I’m going to do evil’. They say: ‘I’m going to make the world a better place.'” (Christopher Booker) [NB: Especially if those individuals are the adherents of a dogmatic, schematic, aggressive, totalizing, and control-oriented ideology that is 100% immersed in the notions that it -- and it alone -- holds all the answers to all questions, that it has a monopoly on all truths -- forever, and that it is entitled to function as a savage guardian of the only 'correct', utterly beneficent, and legally permitted set of concepts, enshrined in an imposed cast-in-stone vocabulary.]

To doubt, to "say that truth is not the 'truth'," thus ought to be the fundamental essence of any and every research dialogue. There are of course those who tend to assert that "the creation of doubt is a pernicious and rhetorical agent" [what we have here is a ye olde tactical deployment of agnotology, i.e. the analysis of that type of ignorance which may be fostered by the circulation of misinformation designed to mislead -- in this particular case, however, it goes a little like this: 'you are questioning my argument and you are by definition evil, as we have already established by prior unassailable definition ex nihilo, therefore your creation of doubt about my claim confirms that you are indeed evil and that you spread 'misinformation', all of which intelligendum nude ac impliciter est, and thus it further confirms the truth of my claim -- or something along such utterly circular lines']. It is, however, that very creation of doubt that really fuels scientific and scholarly revolutions, paradigm changes, and human progress. To find it hard that someone might dare to doubt and therefore question one's 'truth' -- whereupon one begins to emote about it being "very disturbing" because one then finds it hard to remain civil and carry on a true conversation, as opposed to a one-sided and proselytizing pseudo-'conversation' -- only reveals that the interlocutor never sought any genuine dialogue at all, ab initio. The 'truth' in question had already become for that particular interlocutor a matter of faith, as opposed to the far more modest status of a scholarly argument always exposed to scrutiny and refutation.

Note: You will notice throughout this page a recurrence of the term "invariant" (the first such instance is found in a nearby paragraph), which refers to a salient phenomenon. Normally one would expect to hear, when it comes to various gripping socio-political, cultural, economic, technological, scientific and other issues, a polyphony of individuals with fairly variegated personal background histories and considerably diverse paths of intellectual formation -- and thus also presumably diverse ways of expressing themselves, framing issues, and handling problems and solutions. Except -- it is in fact not happening. It is supposed to be happening, but it is not. Certainly not in any institutional or organizational or mainstream media or 'social movement' settings. On a plethora of issues, the core 'message' that is being served 24/7 is almost eerily boilerplate. Cutting-edge inter-textual linguistic analysis proves beyond any shadow of doubt that a very large part of the current 'message' never varies and never departs from script. Not only is it conceptually framed in very specific and very easily detected 'on-message' ways, in near-perfect synchrony across 'media' platforms of all sorts ("themed coverage" and "managed spontaneity" -- as (un)convincingly 'spontaneous' as "That's exactly the right message, Rachel, nice job!") but the actual micro-phrasing almost never changes, the choice of words and terms never changes, the sequences and cadences are always the same. Aww shucks! Seed money and lavish research funding can buy you placard-waving 'gras-roots action' and lab-coated 'scientific consensus' but it can't buy any credible "natural language" messaging variance? That, my Friend, is a really lousy investment in really sub-par 'messaging' bots ... Moreover, the talking points, the practically ritual responses, the ritual accusations and ritual apologies, verbal knee-jerk reactions, all of these are eerily mechanistic. Again, cross-textual parsing, at cutting-edge analysis level, can be very useful. What we have here is an unabashed ideological paid-for echo chamber. Swap the individuals and the settings or venues at will, and you will still get the same 'right message' playing over and over and over. It is almost too easy, childishly easy, to throw together a digital montage of dozens of 'expert' talking heads mouthing identical meaningless ideological verbiage in near perfect real-time on screen sync. Or to compile a gallery of 'influencer' tweets rolled out almost at the same time, same 'power words', same points, everything the same, right down to identical stale 'jokes'.The cadences then spill over into college student essays and into utterly boilerplate responses regurgitated by secondary cycle teachers and schoolchildren. It is becoming more and more difficult to foster independent thought. And of course there always is the Great Invariant Number One: anything that fails to chime in with the approved Narrative, in any field of endeavour or any intellectual venue, or anything that is simply 'inconvenient', no matter how well researched and supported by rock solid evidence, is automatically and always portrayed as "a now discredited theory" or a so-called "conspiracy theory". This is plus ultra social programming, to a degree that goes beyond the ridiculous. Wag the Dog.

“In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.” (Aldous Huxley)

" 'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.” (Friedrich von Hayek)

“That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely [NB: e.g. 'Eternal Commander,' and the disembodied stencilled giant eyes of the Great Leader(s) watching over the 'joyous' masses for "thousands of years" -- or at least throughout double-, triple-, or quadruple-length terms in office for 'elected' officials, in preparation for a 'hypernormalized' Eternal Rule by a Politburo], you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in Brave New World, partly by ... new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man [NB: "Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy" (George Orwell, 1984); Zhao-Gao-style (pre-207 BC) zhǐ lù wéi mǎ reality-control or 'reframing' or 'adjusting the lens'; "the ... totalitarian myth claims supremacy over thought -- a myth based on 'deeper' intuition, so that it does not have to justify itself ["100% Consensus"] ... For this to be possible, of course, all logical and empirical rules have to be declared irrelevant, and that is what Marcuse for instance purported to do] and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions [NB: The Narrative -- telling 'stories'], and his physiology even ... " (Aldous Huxley)

The only possible countervailing choice is a Feynmanian one: “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible” . Simply ignore the ideologue and The Party Line. "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned" (Richard P. Feynman)

"Unanimity of thought is the arteriosclerosis of society." (Anatole France)

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” (Galileo Galilei) [I.e. compared to the problem-solving potential of the individual and of individual excellence, there is nothing of real worth to be found in pompous 'authoritative' fiat and in a mechanistic bureaucratic consensus that reflects mere career-saving obeissance to a rigid Party Line and that is rooted in overarching schematic ideologies, in boilerplate identity politics, and in 'authority' that stems largely from 'ascriptive' status.] [NB: Of course, in the eyes of many Newspeak Champions, Galileo's advice is very much passé. He was guilty of such disgusting and clearly 'dangerous', 'threatening', 'aggressive', 'oppressive', and 'unsafe' individualism. Such nauseatingly meritocratic 'conceit'! Did he not know that only in 97%-100% consensus lieth Absolute Salvation? Anomalous, cognitively-dissonant results, those results that happen to destroy cherished and institutionalized hypotheses, those results that are falsely called 'discoveries' by all the evil 'fake news "untrusted" websites you never heard of', those results that are ignorantly touted only by those who do not believe in 'The Science', those results are the ones you must be suspicious of. They are 'conspiracy theory'! They disturb the ideologically imposed and mandatory 'peace of the community'. So uncollegial, these hoary old and 'toxic' Galileo types! And that vile Socrates! Arrest them for 'incitement'! Off to the dungeon with them! Make them drink hemlock! And remove them from Facebook! Ban them from Twitter PERMANENTLY! Such people 'dangerously undermine Truth'®,™! Horrid, horrid, 'toxic' and 'unsafe' minds! We need to hire more mind and food inspectors! Many, many, many more!]

"A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth -- some obvious truth he [or she or it] isn't supposed to say." (Michael Kinsley) [NB: Universally known as the 'Kinsley gaffe'. Stellar example: "one of the goals of fighting 'misinformation' [is] to [minimize] negative coverage of [a] government’s handling of [xyz]", followed by "but we do it while respecting freedom to criticize" followed by "this was erroneous information" followed by "the official in question never said that" (even though he did, on camera) followed by "the official in question was not authorized to say that" followed by "you have taken things out of context" followed by "Russian bots made that statement" followed by "unknown hackers tampered with the data" followed by "you are spreading dangerous misinformation and fomenting social stress" followed by "you are disloyal and will be arrested" followed by "we do everything for the good of the people and have never ever been moved by ideology". This typical sequence occurs always, with suitable variations. It indeed can be very embarrassing for a politician to accidentally tell the truth. If that happens, it is in the politician's or functionary's or Party Member's quintessential interest to immediately start lying again, and to enlist the Party apparatus and the 'faithful' to choose Truth over Facts, to declare that the words were never said, that the relevant footage was 'damaged' or cannot be found or never existed, and to make sure that all original records have been properly purged as well as permanently removed from 'social media'.]

If one engages in critique, one must quite naturally expect countervailing critique. If one engages in deconstruction, on must expect a critical or even hostile deconstruction of the deconstruction. Those ought to be the rules of an open intellectual forum. Unless of course one loudly preaches critique and loves critiquing others yet gets mightily upset the very instant any critique at all flows the other way. Unless one ostensibly rejects bias, but de facto follows the policy that all ideas endorsed by one's faction must always be "understood on their own merit" and may never be explored with any intent "to disprove them". Which of course is de facto biased ... The fact is that rationally assessing and correcting and disproving incomplete or contentious data -- as needed and warranted, or 'creating doubt', as needed and warranted, is not some sort of "pernicious" and merely "rhetorical" tool. On the contrary, it is something that sheds light and moves knowledge forward. "Truth emerges when different groups of explorers listen to each other ... and correct each other’s mistakes" (Freeman Dyson [1923-2020]). Plug in agnotology with an ideological twist, however, and all of this quickly becomes a slapping contest, with accusations of bad faith being traded back and forth -- either side in the debate will start claiming that 'harmful' general ignorance arises from purported misinformation allegedly spread by the other side. Under normal circumstances, a kind of chess game unfolds -- your turn, my turn, your turn, my turn. Playing chess, cards, Dungeons and Dragons, tabletop simulations, etc., habituates players to the sequence. But the system is of course fragile -- to break it, it is enough for one player to refuse to take turns -- (A) Your turn; (B) My turn, OK; (A) My turn; (B) No! You are out of order! Turn denied! My turn!; (A) OK, OK, your turn, just this once; (B) My turn, OK!; (A) My turn now; (B) No! You are oppressive! Evil! Entitled! How dare you speak! Don't be so 'fragile'! You had an opportunity to keep quiet but you chose to speak up. You are 'depraved'! My turn! Forever!

Ultimately, someone will simply hoist totalitarian colours, to shut down all debate, either (A) or (B). A simple and crude argumentum potestatis.

Any argument, however, that typically cannot abide opposition, and also feels compelled to invoke the coercive power of law (whether religious or secular), 'security', and administration to impose itself and to silence all non-compliant thought, across the board, is no longer an argument. It is a naked and blatant instrument of totalitarian power. Totalitarian twists of (un)logic or anti-logic always seek to push manipulatively expedient Overton windows further and further, in their quest for cowed mass compliance with various Narratives that ravenously seek a verbal (and thus cultural and political) Total Spectrum Dominance ... until the process spirals into devouring itself, and all its protagonists, as well as random bystanders who become 'collateral damage' for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then the process begins to consume even the very originators of the process. Saint-Just, Couthon and Maximilien and Augustin Robespierre of the Comité de salut public (pun fully and deliberately intended) experienced with quite a shock, on 28 July 1794, how swiftly the grinding machinery can process its own creators.

"Slaughter in the name of the ‘people’ ... thought police, the ruthless suppression of dissent, mass murder for ideological purity, – all started in the orgy of murder and nihilism unleashed by the furies of Jacobinism. They started by killing aristocrats and royalists, then moderates (like the Girondists), then dissidents, then any who had doubts ..." (Don Feder -- whether he deserves to be cited is beside the point -- just a freedom of speech blip) [NB: What dear Don forgets, throwing a really strange and very odd 'veil of decency' over actual crude reality, is that after those 'who had doubts', the mindless machine also crunched those who were of a 'different revolutionary faction' and then it started purging the loudest and most prominent 'creators' -- dear old Saint-Just, Maximilien, Augustin, and their buddy-buddies. Lesson derived? Be your own. Never ever bow to another, never belong to another, never ever bow to raucous mediatized or state-sponsored or state-approved ideology without having thought things through by yourself and for yourself, after having checked things on your own. Do not yield, under any circumstances. Kick back, hard, as hard as you can and then some more, with all the craft you possess -- go for the groin (legally, of course, only 'legally') -- before you are prevented from kicking and you suddenly find yourself minus a head, by a decree of some so-called authorities preaching an intransigent totalitarian ideology!]

"Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice” (Maximilien Robespierre, Address to the National Assembly, 5 Feb. 1794, "The Terror Justified") [NB: Anyone perceive the supreme irony, given how good ol' Maxie ended up? Minus his heroic head? The Revolution eats its own -- children and ancestors alike. 1938 kangaroo court trial of Nikolai Bukharin. Ice-pick and Trotsky. Purge, purge, purge. Ideological quasi-religious 'purity' above all else. György Lukács kicked out of the Party. No matter how far one goes in demonstrating one's unquestioning loyalty to The Cause, unquestioning to the point of sheer imbecility, no matter how far one goes in demonstrating one's willingness to do literally anything for The Cause, without questions -- Karel Kryl's " "Brain zapped by obedience and reason zapped by faith / our 'correct' identity is more than a lump of fish bait!" -- it literally never is enough and never will be enough. Fanaticism brooks no dissent. There will always be someone more 'radical' craving 5 minutes of public stage limelight. Fully along the lines of today's 'Age of Twitter-Mob "Justice" ' and instant 'execution' by trending viral hash-tag. "Doesn't matter how much he did for this or that or The 'Cause'. We have moved on! That was, we are like, a thousand years ago! Forward! Forward! 'Cancel' him/her/it! Effective immediately!!!" "Doesn't matter how much she wrote. Burn it!! Get rid of it! 'Cancel' it!! Now! She has sinned now!!! Witch!!! Heretic!! Swipe left!!!!" Oh well ... Nothing ever really changes, does it? Fiery and sanpaku-eyed Savonarola, accusatory index finger wagging in the air, mouth gaping and twisted in ideological wrath, preaching for hours on end one day, to a cheering crowd, and then getting 'swiped left' at the execution stake the very next day, before an equally madly cheering crowd. The nature of the power-hungry sanpaku-eyed zealotic sicarius beast namely is what the nature of the beast is. And then all the Maxies get really Maxied by next-gen Maxies ... just 'swiped left' on the iPhone guillotine ... Just like when the gloriously 'incorruptible' Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria was officially 'cancelled' by Pavel Batitsky on 23 December 1953 (deservedly, for a change -- and every former scientist and researcher inmate of the "sharashka" political detention subsystem, plus a great many across the whole of Eastern Europe, raised a full glass of whatever happened to be at hand: in a sparkling toast to darling old Beria's 'cancellation'). "Swipe left"!!!!! All the while the heroes of the current Twitter-mob hungrily grift $69,000 here and $89,000 there for utterly non-existent crowd-funded game projects and then moan how impoverished and 'oppressed' they are while jet-setting around the globe.]

No 'right-wing' or revisionist platform is thus required to support the notion that attempts to ban free speech are intrinsically totalitarian. That notion can easily be defended in perfect congruence with Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, plus a plethora of others. Is it not Derrida, we ask, who posits that the fundamentally ambiguous nature of language makes the true intention of an utterance quite unknowable? Hear that, Twitter, Facebook, and company? Are you perhaps a little behind on your reading of the progressive 'classics'? Really? In the absence of the possibility to readily prove (i.e. truly 'know') the 'actual intention' of a given utterance, attempts to police that utterance pre-emptively degenerate all too often into an arbitrary and one-sided enforcement of discrete ideological blueprints. Especially so if the 'language' rules are intentionally crafted in such a vague and sweeping manner that they ipso facto become a tempting tool: a tool in the service of zealous factional agendas and of a protagonist's search for 'five-minutes of social media stardom' at any cost. Such rules are easily twisted to serve virtually any purpose. They are not equitable and universal 'rules', but crude and random political levers. The same is true of equivalent digital engine censorship algorithms. They are at best disingenuous and at worst entangled in utterly cynical hypocrisy and in crass double standards, and thus devoid of legitimacy -- devoid of any grounding in factual proof.

Moreover, the tragedy is that those who vocally championed free speech in a not so distant past, when it happened to serve their own factional and political needs, are all too often the very same people (and/or their intellectual and physical descendants) who now seek to curb free speech, ban, shadow-ban, de-platform, etc. The most hysterically funny thing, in this context, is that it was Karl Marx, none other, who wrote in his 1842-1843 articles on the freedom of the press published in the Rheinische Zeitung: "Censorship, like slavery, can never be rightful, even though it existed a thousand times in the form of laws. ... A censored press is a thing without a backbone, a vampire of slavery, a civilized monstrosity, a scented freak of nature". There, chomp on that! Soooo very inconvenient, is it not? Will take a dose of good ol' sophistry to 'de-platform' that, of course. And now the former champions of free speech satirize Free Speech as 'Freeze Peach' and wish to ban and play itsy-bitsy tinpot Censor? They want to ban 'problematic' speakers and researchers from campus? When it was none other than Marx who wrote: "For is it not a denial of one person's freedom to demand that he should be free after the manner of another?" Too lazy to read Marx and too busy banning speech and shouting slogans? Clearly yes. Why? Simply, of course, because speech no longer happens to serve them alone, exclusively, 'for eternity'. What we have here is hypocrisy, zealotry, and Orwellian "doublethink" at its finest and most historically revealing: "What serves me shall never, ever be permitted to serve thee," plus impassioned complaints about "upside-down optics". Translation: only my "optics" are always correct (whatever they might be, i.e. whatever my Movement [whatever it might be] has mandated). Only my "optics" are always the right side up, forever -- yours are always "wrong", forever. By definition antipodian -- upside-down. And we all just know how evil those antipodians are and how depraved and how malignant, don't we? Real "toxicity and cancer". Just 'apologists' for 'XYZ'. Why? Are they not antipodians? Is it not obvious? Is it not "in their DNA or something"? Oh, well, excuse me -- is this not supposed to be 'bigotry', actually? See, this entire gambit works both ways -- 100% both ways. So very vexing, is it not, when the conceptual howitzer that one factional group has pre-positioned and then carelessly left unattended at a wrecked street corner, still loaded with all the verbal grapeshot, is seized by another factional group, spun around, deftly pointed, and discharged straight down the path of the very same group that left it at the ready in the first place. This, exactly this, is why the PSR refuses to be a monotone mouthpiece 'serving' just one side. We do not 'serve', no 'democratic centralism' here -- we are no one's 'servants' or 'allies'. Which is presumably why some people might argue we ought to be destroyed: "If you are not with us, you are against us" [Been. There. Done. That. Not. Impressed.]

In a more general sense, what we have here is an absolutely classic example of rolling waves of "revolutionary consolidation", in other words of pure Bonapartism in its historical stage of de facto political decrepitude, functionally masquerading as enlightened "forward-looking" tyranny. It is quite amusing that yesteryear's idealistic reformers cannot bring themselves to see what they truly become once they have reached late-stage Party-crony Plenum Bonapartism. It is quaint to see them pretend disingenously and in an ego-saving manner, to others and to themselves, that they cannot and also should not see. A prime example -- if there ever were any -- of "... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them" (1984, Part 2, chap. 9).The actual mechanism of such ritualized unseeing does not really matter. Above all, no matter what you do, close your eyes and keep them firmly shut while internalizing The Message. Eyes shut wide. Opening your eyes is streng Verboten. The effective political goal and results are always the same. The unseeing ones ought to re-read Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It would hurt them of course. It would make them howl in yet another spasm of offended rage. It would conjure an awful spectre -- the possibility that today's champions of truly Byzantine verbal compliance, and their enabling theoreticians, lawyers and HR bureaucrats, are little more than yet another evanescent facet of age-old processes, those very processes that "demonstrate how the class struggle ... create(s) circumstances and relationships that ma(k)e it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part" (Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire) [NB: Could this analysis be extended to entire civilizations, once those civilizations start incentivizing mediocrity and absolute subservience as a preferred career trajectory?]. And, of course, with late-stage Bonapartism comes a new 'avant-garde' freshly minted aristocracy. Just a French 'oddity'? You must be joking! Fiery commitment to 'proletarian internationalist value-sets' undoubtedly was the reason -- right? -- why Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria (yes, that Beria, of the NKVD and MVD) carefully spread around rumours that he descended on the maternal side from the ancient lineage of the Counts Dadiani. The reason -- right? -- why he married Nino Gegechkori, a Countess, daughter of Teimuraz Gegechkori and Countess Dariko Chikovani. Oh, yes, that Comrade Beria ... the fiery and murderous guardian of revolutionary 'Integrity'. If it were not for Beria's many victims, it would be difficult to suppress belly-slapping sardonic laughter ... /sarc on/ Advanced revolutionary chic, so stylish, more chic than BoBo 'bourgeois bohemianism'... and you scored a Countess, no less .... Well done, Comrade! /sarc off/

Circling back to the broader topic, it is devastatingly intellectually lazy to dismiss with a blanket application of purportedly all-explaining labels every single thing that one happens to (or pretends to) dislike -- or that one is potty-trained to 'dislike' by one's ideological allies, friends, partners, allegiances, handlers, or the nagging necessities of a job search. The vast majority of the labels in question are and always have been part and parcel of a purely "political vocabulary" -- a schematic and very basic toolkit, largely invariant so that it could easily be regurgitated on demand. A toolkit designed to rally and to motivate, not to think de facto (and yes, using this as a pun we do indeed mean 'thinking on the basis of independently assessed facts and data -- not feelings, emotions, Party programs, slogans, States of Fear, implanted beliefs, etc'). A "political vocabulary" in the service of aгитация и пропаганда has little or nothing to do with free and reasoned inquiry. The fervour of ideological shock-troops has never been successfully elicited through calm open discourse. Only the rhythmical drumbeat of slogans and street-gutter name-calling does the trick. A scattershot deployment of catch-all labels -- from 'fake news' to 'disinformation', 'denialism', 'offensive', 'injurious', 'harmful', 'conspiracy theory', 'microaggression', 'heresy', 'deviationism', 'revisionism', 'collaborationism', and the expanding array of other '-ism', '-ist' and '-phobic' imagery -- all too often says infinitely more about the labeller than about any sort of reality in terms of that which is being labelled. But then, the purpose of "political vocabularies" has always been such .. whether the aim is to narrow the range of language, or 'purify' language, or 'expurgate' language, or create entire new operational vocabularies. Whatever is deemed to work, politically, is the name of the game. By any means necessary.

"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined [i.e. 'Common Language' in various modern politicized variants] and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten ... But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect." (1984, Part 1, chap. 5) [NB: This is -- not the myriad other pretended factors -- is why 'management of terms' and 'speech policy' is so important for all bureaucracies: e.g. "Having a name [for a thing, factor, effect, 'listed behaviour', etc.] matters, to prevent the use of other names ... It also gives us a standard [i.e. Gleichschaltung] format ...".]

"By 2050 [NB: Strange, very, very, very strange, the world seems to be almost on the deep preset schedule, chronologically -- does fiction imitate 'reality or does 'reality' imitate fiction?] — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be [NB: This is really superb, in terms of predictive capability, utterly superb -- Orwell 100% foresaw all the making "more relevant to contemporary society [regardless of any historical context]" when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four]. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. [NB: And here we get to the very, very ancient 'servus servorum Dei', 'servitor of deity XYZ' paradigm, a styling and conceptualization and mindset that in fact reaches all the way back to the seals and clay cuneiform tablets of Ebla and Mari and Ugarit, and back to 2,500 BCE, and earlier]. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." (1984, Part 1, chap. 5) [NB: Old Man of the Mountain spliff-cut with other fervent ideologues, a verbal soup laced with chemical opiates, fake Nirvana -- and the unanswered question: cui bono? Who gains? Who pulls the strings? Always follow the money trails !]

"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words…. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words…. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum." (George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak”) [NB: That is why, to navigate the rocky shores of Newspeak (Inverted Reality Neo-Language), one needs a bevy of largely ignorant and de facto undereducated and utterly self-serving but ideologically vetted and party-card-carrying PR hacks who provide guidance with regard to 'safe expression' and write appropriately approved talking points, speeches, social media posts, slogans, posters, banners, scripted 'spontaneous' shout-outs, exhibit panels, award texts, songs, 'motivational' fluff, public service announcements, ideology-buttressing movie scripts, etc. To churn out the ideological messaging requires an entire industry, and as those working in that industry depend on it for their livelihoods, they are not going to think independently. It is not in their most fundamental interest. Their task is to follow the 'style sheet', keep quiet, and do as they are told. Progress through ranks and 'incentives' depend on how much they stay 'on message'. It is so comforting, is it not, when one does not "have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future" (sic).]

Ultimately, the goal of "political vocabularies" is to shut down independent reasoning completely and to stir manipulable passions to a boiling pitch. The explicitly political vocabulary functions as a self-activating and launch-and-forget partisan IFF transponder. That is its precise tactical purpose (it of course has other, ideological, indoctrinative, and doctrine-shaping purposes): it enables partisan supporters to 'live in the moment of action' (à la Mussolini) and to attack as a co-ordinated drone swarm guided by nothing more than the IFF verbal signal. The only factor that matters at the moment of encounter (written, social media, classroom, campus, iPhone camera, public space, physical, kinetic) is to strike from every possible direction at the designated 'enemy', 'kulak', '-ist', 'landlord', 'bourgeois intellectual' or whatever else doctrine demands. It does not matter one iota who and what the individual at the receiving end really is. What is being attacked is merely the IFF signal, the concept, the label -- and so much the worse if the label patently does not fit its purported human embodiment. Then the attack will redouble, ever more raucously, to the hypnotic rhythm of placard- and hand-waving accompanied by thought-deactivating chants, designed to obfuscate and drown out mere facts and to render the IFF signal more 'legitimate'. Even if there never have been any real 'kulaks' or 'heretics' or 'witches' in the village, they will be found (i.e. manufactured). Ideology demands it. In fact, manufacturing a 'designated enemy' or a craftily 'designated existential threat' is absolutely crucial for all would-be universalist and totalitarian systems, so that they could seize power and hold on to it, presumably 'forever' -- at which point the former 'agents of change' immediately become stern censors and suppressors of any further change. To this end, a critical mass of humans must be forcefully activized into a schematic fear of and an ideologically scripted loathing for the 'designated' threat, and they need to be persuaded that their cause alone is 'just', mere facts be damned (even though the 'cause' typically is not grass-roots at all but an ideological construct artfully cobbled together by a Movement's intellectual and activist shock-troops -- the 'Vanguard', or a semantic equivalent thereof).

Furthermore, the process also requires a systematic top-down indoctrination of children, preferably from the kindergarten age-bracket up. Only thus will they be useful to the ideologues, as mobilized 'intergenerational influencers' and then as adolescent political cadres. National Socialist Germany used these exact techniques before and during WWII. The eery similarities between those years and phenomena and certain trends quite unmistakably evident today have not gone unnoticed: "Different upbringings produce different people. The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive [NB: quite frankly, this terms ought to have been by all rights in quotation marks], varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers' view of the world." (The Christian Institute and others (Appellants) v. The Lord Advocate (Respondent) (Scotland), Trinity Term, [2016] UKSC 51, on appeal from: [2015] CSIH 64, 28 July 2016, 73-74, pp. 33-34, further contextually and pertinently invoking, among other, El-Al Israeli Airlines Ltd v. Danielowitz [1992-4] IsrLR 478, para 14): "The factual premise is that people are different from one another, ‘no person is completely identical to another’ … Every person is a world in himself. Society is based on people who are different from one another. Only the worst dictatorships try to eradicate these differences,” as well as McReynold, SCUS, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters 268 US 510 (1925), 534-535: "The child is not the mere creature of the state"). The problem of course is that seizing control of an educational process in order to benefit and promote a specific ideology that willy or nilly will define "who we are" is unbearably tempting. And ageless. And pervasive. Imagine winning an ideological war as inexpensively as possible, simply by hijacking the minds of other people's children. Yay! Fantastic! Go for it! Mandatory curriculum constructed entirely around one specific ideology. Only one side of any argument, at all times. Mandatory doctrine, mandatory dogma, mandatory words, mandatory Marxism-Leninism, mandatory this and mandatory that -- anything but balanced and objective tools fostering the rise of independently thinking individuals who think outside the box and use reason instead of regurgitating ideological pap on demand, instead of obediently shutting out as 'disinformation' and 'nonsense', everything that the ideology designates as such. Independently thinking people are of course 'dangerous' and 'disturbing'. Dangerous to The Matrix.

"… as soon as one wants to go farther [than elementary notions of geometry, the natural sciences, and the valid laws of the country], serious difficulties appear. Teaching at the elementary level necessarily turns into indoctrination. It is not feasible to represent to adolescents all the aspects of a problem and to let them choose between dissenting views …The party that operates the schools is in a position to propagandize its tenets and to disparage those of other parties." (Ludwig von Mises).

“Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.” / “You had to live -– did live, from habit that became instinct –- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” / “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.” (George Orwell, 1984)

In any case, back to the main strand of the argument. The more the 'officially designated' enemies subsequently deny that they are 'privileged kulaks' or 'heretics' or some other such label, and the more they try to argue or explain, the more they are declared guilty, of course -- it simply is the nature of a 'kulak' to deny being a 'kulak', you see, so that he might systemically benefit from the universal evil of 'kulakism'. Any defense or any realist analysis or accurate presentation of data, any at all, is just a manifestation of retrograde 'false consciousness', and a subterfuge. The enemy obtusely refuses to 'recognize' he is a 'kulak', but we can see straight through that -- ha, ha, ha -- because we know who is and who is not. We have studied it very hard in "books and things". In seminars! We have 'raised consciousness', we "reach higher", and 'reveal' and 'unmask'! "She is a witch because she denies being one" (The Crucible, Act III & Act IV). The template is always the same, invariant, only the proclaimed 'evildoer' labels keep getting swapped -- a good hint that the whole thing is a power-hungry Matrix sham, a farce, a comedy. For 'true believers', finding the guilty ones, 'identifying' , 'exposing', 'unmasking' them, making them 'confess', making them 'afraid', holding them 'accountable' for what they never really committed is namely an essential self-corroborating proof that the ideology, whatever it might be, is true and also the sacred locus of raw power -- the raw power of un-thinking things that have been designated as 'hateful'. It requires no facts, no logic. Logic would only obtrude. Logic would in fact be dangerous. If the class / oppressor / Other / different-thinker / other-doer 'enemies' are not found -- and found repeatedly, over and over again, by any means necessary -- chances namely are the ideology might crumble and melt like snow in late spring. It would die in the stink of dogma. It would lose charge and momentum. So, like, we have only XYZ months before we absolutely must achieve total radical Victory, BAMN. Or the sickly-sweet dopamine momentum will dissipate. So, like, see, no offence and nothing personal, y'all Kulaks or Bourgeois, or Citoyens Capet, or Hiders in the 'Priest Hole', or Deluded Counter-Revolutionaries or Revisionist Deviants -- see, like, it’s less about individual instances of Kulakism and Bourgeoism and Capetism and Priestism and Witchism and Sectism and Arianism and Thisism and Thatism, including Creepy Revisionism and Creeping Counter-Revolutionism and Trotskism and Beryism and Bernsteinism and Deviationism and also Struvism and Brentanoism and Renegade Kautskyism and all that awful Evilly Wrong Positionality, and, like, it's rather sort of, like, kind of, like, you know, how we’re thinking about all of these as the foundation of all Creepy Evil. So, it's, like, categorically general. Nothing personal. You're just a meme for a Manichean category that we have, like, 'revealed' because it was 'inevitable'. So, sorry that y'all will be minus your creepy heads. Because, like, pretty much all is Kulak-ist and has been Kulak-ist for thousands and thousands of years, because we say so, and we have, like, 'revealed' this Kulak-ist category that is so broad because it covers All and Everything so that it's pretty much arbitrary and useless but at the same time very good because it really covers Everything and we do not have to bother with any Creepy Stuff and with Creepers. So, we are like: with a category like that we will never commit "category errors". Yay!!! So, we are like: it's all nails and so we, like, need really truckloads of hammers here. Because, like, the nails need to get hammered, when they are, like, everywhere ... And sorry that we'll have to, like, charge all the Deniers the wear and tear of this guillotine blade thing so that they would Educate Themselves. Nothing personal, like, you know, you are just a meme Instance of Evil that is in Your DNA or something and must be, like, you know, 'eradicated' and, like, 'mended' that way. It's, like, a Teachable Moment to rewire your brain, which is really best done through, like, Real Justice. So do not offer non-compliance ... and remember that you have earned no Right to Speak. So, before you go up those stairs to the Justice Podium, apologize for, like, your serious lapses in judgment that, like, involve your actually existing at all, in our version of 'reality' that is not, like, 'real' but 'relative' .....

But the ultimate gambit that loops the loop is to begin affirming that either the target is 'offensive' (morally or ideologically) merely by attempting to use defensive tactics of 'precautionary behaviour' that reduce the chances of getting accused of this or that, or that the very fact that the target behaves thus is automatic grounds for suspicion -- or even outright proof -- that the target must have 'something to hide' and is therefore already 'guilty'. For who would follow precautionary principles if they have 'nothing to hide', right? Remember: “People who want to demonstrate their innocence make displays of cooperation with investigators.” Submit! Absolute Submission is the very highest proof of righteousness. Always! In any circumstances whatsoever! It is 'highly offensive' and 'unsafe' to act otherwise! You are simply guilty because "people like you" are guilty. And we are so very enraged that you have knocked the tools of easy false labelling and accusation out of our hands before we sprang our favourite boilerplate trap. How dare you! You must be very evil and depraved indeed! How dare you not leave yourself wide open to whatever charge we might happen to cook up? Howl, howl, howl, howl ... Currently being delivered in infinite and easily spotted twists of similarly framed tactics, everywhere, 24/7, streaming to your iPhone through a multi-Googolplex of sponsored channels.

The ultimate answer to the above is of course: μολων λαβέ. With panache and a grin ... and utter scorn: μολων λαβέ.

The Review thus rejects any ostentatious 'non-platforming', artificially promoted 'safe spaces', the shaming of researchers to "get back in their own traffic lane," and other pre-emptive 'global crowdstrike' modes of shutting down well documented arguments. We reject the collective “Two Minutes' Hate” sessions followed by the “deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!… B-B!’ [Big Brother] — over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second.” What it was that Orwell actually satirized with this "B-B chant " meme is by now known well enough not to require explanation. All right, yes, everyone is aware of the explanatory twists. Do we go with Anthony Burgess's interpretation, i.e. "Bennett's correspondence education courses" and their posters, which actually were strangely 'constructivist'? "Big Brother is watching you" <= "Le Me Be Your Big Brother" <= "Let Me Be Your Father" (namely J. M. Bennet). Or do we rather go with Brendan Bracken the Minister of Information. "B.B." as everyone referred to him. And by extension the "B - (deep drawled pause) - B - (deep drawled pause) - C"?

"At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmic chant of 'B-B! . . . B-B! . . . B-B!'—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second—a heavy murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamps of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise" (George Orwell, 1984)

"The trick used by Himmler…was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!" (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem)

Is our stance either 'non-progressive' or 'conservative?'Not at all, really. The Review celebrates -- quite, really, honestly, we mean it -- the free speech implications of what can for instance be culled from Althusser and innumerable others -- namely that our beliefs, desires, preferences, and choices are deeply rooted in social practices. That society moulds the individual in its own current image through ideology as a set of signs and symbols carried, implemented, and enforced through language. Many have quite rightly deemed such moulding oppressive, in the past, even outright 'totalitarian'. Just like it is oppressive to see someone with a BA in philosophy but no sustained publishing record in economics induce a video-sharing service to censor alternative 'readings' of the history and role of the Federal Reserve, for instance. On what grounds, exactly? Are 'alternative readings' not all the rage? Are they not a 'very advanced' post-modern approach? "Quackery?" Once one detects 'quackery', one addresses the "quackery" by writing a serious and impeccably supported 1,000-page book supported by ample sources and demonstrating at length why and how the "quackery" occurred and what its exact nature is. One does not go invoking censorship. And please do note that we have not written, above -- 'with no PhD in economics': we are not fans of mechanistic 'credentialism' and 'appeals to authority', we merely advocate for free meticulous research and meticulous scholarship, by whoever is capable of it, with whatever qualifications they happen to have.

If one accepts that even Althusser, for instance, implicitly supported free speech, then one also must logically accept the following. Attempts to regulate minutely what specific 'language' ought to be used in research or teaching (as is increasingly being done) are therefore profoundly and deliberately totalitarian. As are regulations with regard to the circumstances under which -- and by whom -- language ought to be monitored, tracked, quantified, evaluated, 'reported', policed, denounced, and doxxed. Denounced anonymously, of course, under the cover of darkness -- under the long historical shadow of the Inquisition, the Gestapo, the StaSi, the NKVD, the KGB, and other "vanguard of the future" equivalents. Incidentally, we do think there is something oddly poetic in the fact that Google, back in November 2018, was offered the premises of the old communist GDR StaSi (Staatssicherheit -- State Security) headquarters (still intact, complete with basement detention and interrogation cells) in Berlin-Lichtenberg as its new main hub in Germany. Historical birds of a feather ... ?

“Secrecy begets tyranny.” (Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land)

Anyway, by now it has become patently obvious that far too many of various anonymous "protected accuser" accusations and denunciations are typically 'resolved', as virtually 'standard operating procedure', within institutional 'disciplinary' Star Chamber hearings often headed by a single, self-appointed, and definitely not legally qualified or competent 'investigator'. Such institutional Star Chambers (a) enjoy undue authority hedged around by 'privacy' directives or 'confidentiality directions' (“avoid any public comments on the investigation” -- effectively a pre-emptive blanket gag order that imposes total silence on the 'accused' and places the socially isolated 'accused' exclusively at the total mercy of an ad hoc in-house organ that lacks any officially acknowledged jurisdiction whatsoever, i.e. Saul Alinsky's Rule #13: "identify, isolate, freeze and escalate", (b) blatantly flout or are inexpert in due process and proper discovery, or simply a priori despise due process on ideological grounds, (c) effectively nullify or have been known to nullify or outright despise, on ideological grounds, factual rules of evidence, due process, due process rights, and the presumption of 'innocent until proven guilty', and (d) sabotage any chance by the 'accused' to challenge and cross-examine witnesses, and to be represented by a lawyer ('right to counsel') from the very beginning in order (i) to even out the playing field between a cash-flush and legally super-powerful institution with basically unlimited and frequently tax-payer furnished resources and an individual with limited or zero resources, and (ii) to ensure a duly informed and structured defense based on impartially collected and expertly verified data. All of this, aways, under an absolute secrecy veil of that in-house confidentiality clause -- in other words, from a historical perspective, an explicitly and deliberately Inquisitional process in nature . An institutional hanging without trial, behind closed doors. Effectively, this amounts to using a politically and ideologically driven bill of attainder, because the pseudo-'court' cannot and on ideological principle will not establish a complete evidentiary record subjected to the adversarial elements of an open trial. Such secrecy, such ideologically underwritten unwillingness, is always a tell-tale sign -- as if totalitarians literally could not abide daylight, could not stand fresh air, could not stand any frank challenging look in the eyes, could not stand anything that threatens to bust wide open all the ideology-based behind-the-scenes scheming.

Every single totalitarian regime throughout history has always had secret committees, a behind-the-curtain Inner-Party-Members-only Plenum, Presidium or Politburo ("... there shall be strict Party discipline and the subordination of the minority to the majority ... all decisions of higher bodies shall be absolutely binding on lower bodies and on all Party members"). Every single totalitarian regime has always had the equivalent of a Geheime Staatspolizei. And secret trials intra cubiculum principis (in camera) (such as during the last years of Emperor Claudius [for the sake of a contextually different but operationally similar random example] -- which were utterly overshadowed by Claudius' new wife and Nero's mother, the power-hungry, scheming Agrippina, who for political purposes wielded poisons and false accusations with equal mastery, or during the later stages of Nero's reign from the late 50s onward). All of these are hall-marks of an emergent or already full-blown totalitarianism, ghosts of the StaSi or NKVD/Cheka, of summary troika 'tribunals', Star Chambers, show trials, etc., no matter what kind of PR 'reframing' and 'change of optics' might be slapped or strapped on the drab reality in attempts to mask it (i.e. camouflage, mimicry, crypsis -- plus all the tools of "branding and brand naming [to] create a more resonant, powerful XYZ" that might be /sarc on/ 'impactfully impactful and impacting' / sarc off/). As in every single revolution that has ever taken place on planet Earth (yes, we include here e.g. Amenhotep IV aka Akhenaten aka "Effective for Aten"), the 'nice' and fuzzily idealist reformers of yesteryear in due course become robotic 'democratically centralist' apparatchik enforcers of one Bonapartist "newspeak" or another, true incarnations of the sinister Joseph Fouché, 1st Duke of Otranto, the ferret-like, pinched, weak-chinned and rather cadaverous-looking Minister of Police, who barely a year before coming out as a fiery champion of the revolutionary "Cult of Reason" had in fact been -- vocally and 'on record' -- an equally fervent advocate of the "role of the clergy in education" and also ostensibly advertised a wish to join the Church. Quite predictably -- always clawing forward "by any means necessary", any lying necessary, any crypsis necessary, so long as Fouché the very fervent champion of Fouché benefited, no matter how many went to the guillotine by his orders. Nothing personal of course, this is "mostly about securing your own paycheck", after all.

Oh how exquisitely 'sensitive' to specific 'constituencies' Fouché was: "... when the blood from the mass executions in the centre of Lyons gushed from severed heads and bodies into the streets, drenching the gutters of the Rue Lafont, the vile-smelling red flow nauseated the local residents, who irately complained to Fouché and demanded payment for damages. Fouché, sensitive to their outcry, obliged them by ordering the executions moved out of the city to the Brotteaux field, along the Rhône [river]". Sense and sensibility and 'justice' incarnate. But of course, the plus is, one must suppose, that he engineered the downfall of Robespierre because quite frankly otherwise it was Fouché's own head in the basket-- and Fouché loved Fouché dearly. The later purging of the Jacobins by the ex-Jacobin Fouché while also catching Royalists in the dragnet was a classic commedia dell'arte. And then of course 18 Brumaire ... And all the other things. And the stint at Internal Affairs. And all the hidden details thereof. And the duché grand-fief of Otranto -- just like Beria marrying a Countess but even better, in fine 'revolutionary' tradition. True to form, in 1814 Fouché switched sides of course, yet again, as he had done so many times before, and joined the invading allies, and conspired against Napoleon. With all sorts of interesting strings attached. A fine bureaucratic Spitzelstaat weasel in the most ageless tradition, and of course an inveterate 'fixer' and 'survivor'. He really proved exquisitely helpful to the restored Bourbons. And "he repaid the contempt of his superiors and the adulation of his inferiors by a mask of impenetrable reserve or scorn". Nothing personal, Citizen, this is 'mostly about securing my own paycheck'. It is such a pity that Fouché was only proscribed and then died peacefully in exile -- he really did deserve the guillotine that he so cynically meted out to others when ideologically expedient. Le petit salaud arriviste had narrowly missed a date with Madame La Guillotine back in 1795. Anyway, enough of this ... surely we have amply qualified by now for one 'teachable moment' or another, and are going to be told in didactic Twitter-tones that The Memoirs of Joseph Fouché, Duke of Otranto, Minister of the General Police of France, are just one of many places where we can duly correct our very poor grasp of history ... bypassing patient and original work in the archives. 'Truth' over Facts, any day.

Fouché and innumerable other players in relevant political processes illustrate the truism that while clawing for power the slogan of the day invariably tends to be: “Question others' authority! It is so liberating!” When safely ensconced in power, a haughty put-down is proffered instead: “Don’t you dare question my authority! You have not earned the right! You are evil, ignorant, biased and uninformed without even realizing that you are [aka the old 'false consciousness' or 'unconscious bias' argumentative canard]. Please educate yourself [or you will be mandatorily 'educated' and 'trained' until you comply]! Now ... you seem like a reasonable person [a standard 'good cop' move, used at one point or another by every skilled interrogator]. Do not be so dramatic. You must know that you exaggerate [lowered tone, fake 'friendly' mien, calming the 'subject' here by lightly tapping into 'subject's insecurities and hopes' and dangling the chimera that some sort of real bilateral conversation might perhaps still be going on]. I actually believe that you’re on our side about all of this. If you actually embrace our actual grounding philosophy, I am sure you will see no problem with affirming "xyz" or complying with "xyz" [fill in the "xyz" with whatever the power-grab script might be; the move is likewise a commonplace interrogation technique -- 'flip the switch' and break the subject's 'idea-consumer resistance' by leveraging against them the momentum of their own basic decency and willingness to talk things through reasonably: it is a rather cheap verbal jiu-jitsu throw]. We are now going to have a 'productive' conversation. It will be an improved conversation, and you will see why you should fully embrace and celebrate my 'values'. Let me propose something to you: I am going to be noble and magnanimous. I will treat you as if you were an ordinary rational person [which of course implies that you are not -- that, like Nikita Khrushchev phrased it on 24 May 1959 -- if you oppose my Ideology you are in fact 'mad'] choosing among those options I permit you to choose from. And you, you will engage 'selective memory' and you will just pretend that your wilful opposition to my dictate was a sorry blip that never happened. Do we have a deal? [or else]!” "Did you not do or commit 'xyz'? Do you not acknowledge having uttered 'xyz'? Do not even answer! These were not questions! Answer 'yes' or 'no'!"


[NB: Of course the above were 'questions', and of course the entire interlocutory sequence is a basic interrogation manoeuvre purposely designed not to make sense at all (a variation on the "Alice in Wonderland" questioning technique), and it is not by any stretch of the imagination any sort of 'conversation', no matter how often the 'conversation' meme is advertised. But that hardly matters -- every Inquisitor of every aeon has proceeded thus. By the way, the 'questioner's' 'xyz' was of course entirely fabricated and logically as well as materially irrelevant -- something like this: This is a very important moral (or whatever) issue that affects us all. You owe this hearing full and candid transparency and you should answer even when I cut you off and prevent you from answering. The important issue is, How many angels can fit on top of a needle? Did you not say that the number is only 65? I do not recall what you exactly said but I do recall very clearly that it was a very small number. Such a small number! Did you know that the true scientific number supported by overwhelming consensus is certainly no less than 11,567,546,345,365,120,784 angels per googolplex, which is a 1 followed by an entire googol of absolute zeros? Such manifestly very large numbers! There is overwhelming consensus, as I said, on this important and vital matter, a consensus of practically all experts. Are you hostile to science? Ah, of course not every policy is scientific ... even when it pretends to be based on 'science'! Don't you know that? Don't you know how 'science' is used politically, in the name of proper 'action'? You ought to know that! You say we were not talking about angels on top of needles? Well, my suspicion is that you might certainly have been saying some hurtful and unsafe things about angels on top of needles, and we shall have to investigate this important matter further. You look like someone who would say such things. It is in your DNA. Meanwhile, please answer the question! And this was not a question! So do not say another word! You have no right to speak or comment! I just asked for a yes or no. Do you think anyone will believe you? And, by the way, you had an opportunity to keep quiet! But ... you chose to speak up! You had to speak up, did you not? That only shows that you are depraved. We have a serious and justified concern about the state of your mental health. So ..., you have only yourself to blame!]

Old shoe, all of this. So, the Alice in Wonderland Interrogation Method: "The aim of the Alice in Wonderland or confusion technique is to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee. He is accustomed to a world that makes some sense, at least to him: a world of continuity and logic, a predictable world. He clings to this world to reinforce his identity and powers of resistance. The confusion technique is deisgned not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the WEIRD. Although this method can be employed by a single interrogator, it is better adapted to use by two or three. When the subject enters the room, the first interrogator asks a double-talk question -- one which seems straightforward but is essentially nonsensical. Whether the interrogatee tries to answer or not, the second interrogator follows up (interrupting any attempted response) with a wholly unrelated and equally illogical query. Sometimes two or more questions are asked simultaneously. Pitch, tone, and volume of the interrogators' voices are unrelated to the import of the questions. No pattern of questions and answers is permitted to develop, nor do the questions themselves relate logically to each other. In this strange atmosphere the subject finds that the pattern of speech and thought which he has learned to consider normal have been replaced by an eerie meanignlessness. The interrogatee may start laughing or refuse to take the situation seriously. But as the process continues, day after day if necessary [NB: "This will continue as long as it remains productive"] the subject begins to try to make sense of the situation, which becomes mentally intolerable. Now he is likely to make significant admissions, or even to pour out his story, just to stop the flow of babble that assails him. This technique may be especially effective with the orderly, obstinate type." [NB: Now just scale this up to entire societies, and cross-apply to various so-called 'hot button' issues. Reminds you of what you see and hear 365/24/7, on all the media channels? It rather does, does it not?]

But the ultimate gambit that closes the loop -- the one with which we have started above, is to begin affirming that either the target is being 'offensive' (morally or ideologically) merely by attempting to adhere to the defensive tactic of 'precautionary solution', or that the very fact that the target behaves thus is automatic grounds for suspicion -- or even outright proof -- that the target must therefore indeed have 'something to hide'. For who would follow precautionary principles if they have 'nothing to hide', right? Remember: “People who want to demonstrate their innocence make displays of cooperation with investigators.” Submit! Absolute Submission is the very highest proof of righteousness. Always! In any circumstances whatsoever! It is 'highly offensive' and 'unsafe' to act otherwise! You are simply guilty because "people like you" are guilty. And we are so very enraged that you have knocked the tools of easy accusation out of our hand before we sprang our favourite boilerplate trap. How dare you! You must be very evil and depraved indeed! How dare you not leave yourself wide open to whatever charge we might happen to cook up? Howl, howl, howl, howl ... Currently being delivered in infinite and easily spotted twists of similarly framed tactics, everywhere, 24/7, streaming to your iPhone through a Googolplex sponsored channels.

Standard. 100% classic. One can easily find formally and structurally equivalent verbal scenarios throughout the entire spectrum of past records of judicial proceedings, from the highest to the lowest legal instance, and in the records of innumerable hearings, commissions of inquiry, governing body deliberations, etc., no matter what the ostensible ideological alignment of the body in question. One of the conjoined tactics that never quite seem to fade from use is to feign outrage when a target adopts a behavioural rule or mode of comportment that broadly neutralizes a certain range of potential accusations. Suppose that the target's adopted precautionary solution is to always have a witness to a conversation or a meeting -- or even better several witnesses -- or to always have an accurate recording of what passed. That is of course highly inconvenient if the standard mode of attack is a type of accusation that is typically predicated on a narrative that the target has been doing -- or is prone to doing --something 'bad' or 'immoral' in secret. An even more potent gambit is one where the alleged 'bad' and 'immoral' thing is not readily apparent at all except to an 'expert' or a special-status accuser, sanctified by zeal for 'justice' and certified by ideological commitment, who is either specially 'trained', or is deemed naturally or divinely suited to 'identify' and 'reveal' and force confessions of hidden misdeeds that in fact are largely non-existent.

It would be tedious to count how many false and self-interested accusations of crypto-Judaizing among converts to Christianity, for instance, were cobbled together exactly this way. To count how many purported 'apostates' from any given religion or ideology have been 'revealed' (the equivalent of modern-day 'doxxing') in exactly this way, simply on grounds of insufficient 'zeal for the cause', 'revisionism', 'deviationism', or supposed behaviourally signalled 'perversion' would be tedious. To count how many 'heretics' have been 'unmasked' this way, denounced and burned at the stake would be tedious. Or how many followers of the 'wrong' version of a religion have been stoned, beheaded, and crucified. To bring up yet again the issue of various 'moral panics' and the Salem witch trials sparked off by the 'testimony' of dysfunctionally hysterical, high-strung and possibly biochemically intoxicated children and teens would be tedious. Incidentally, that is why 'children's movements' and 'children's crusades' and their varied equivalents and permutations have always been rather popular. They make reverse 'Emperor's New Clothes' quite a nifty psy-ops gambit, even though it is one that during all historical eras and cultural contexts has been quite easy to see though. You can inflict the child's irrational and ignorant fears on those around, and leverage it for political purposes -- the child as tool of power, especially if the child 'hears voices' or literally 'sees' in the near-IR, infrared, and microwave bands and thus 'sees' with the naked eye colourless and odourless trace gases whose molecules do not at all reflect or absorb light within the light spectrum perceptible to humans. Then the child, properly chaperoned, properly managed, properly fluffed up by social 'affirmation', can be used as a tool to bludgeon the parents into compliance, drilling into their heads the propagandistic vent-hole that no matter how much they know and no matter how much they see through the whole gambit they better lay low and go with the flow because otherwise they are reactionary ignorant 'bourgies' and very bad people who will end up in jail once The Revolution sweeps the land. How many historically documented accusations of and denunciations for heresy, apostasy and of course also 'sorcery', how many blood libels, etc. were sparked off by children? Lord of the Flies, anyone? How about Lord of the Flies 2.0? 3.0? 4.0?

Has been done many times before, throughout history. So many times it is astounding that any political operator would think this will still work. Even more astounding of course is the fact that it still does work. Why it works is the fabulous cultural meme that a child or 'youth' would never lie and that they possess some unique instant access to some unique truth or insight. "You would not accuse an innocent child, would you? You would not evilly contradict a child? Don't you have any decency? How can you harm the child by contradicting it? The child's word is divine!" A hoary psycho-historical meme and also a para-Marcusian and Gnostic (etc.) shortcut that leverages ostensible 'innocence' and disarming 'honesty' of narrated 'feelings' in the service of a brutal or coercive ideological agenda. Yes, tune in to the Siren voice of the child 'wise beyond its years', who knows all the deep esoteric truths ... because: / sarc on / Children never make up stories and are never quite easily misled and indoctrinated and inducted into cults, covens, and Cultural Revolutions, etc.; they 'intuit' and 'feel' in a Rousseauian way all there is ever to be known. No paltry facts or 'pre-conceived' evil mathematized oppressive normative sciences are required -- just tune in to that piping, high, clear, sincere choir-voice, the 'voice of conscience'. Dissolve in that sweet young falsetto voice of the divine Elagabalus and the other 'divine children'. Never dare to question young Nero's 'divine voice', never question the Child Oracle, the Saint of the Times. All questioning is verboten unless it serves The Narrative. See, children 'get it', unlike you, because children do not have to 'unlearn' the facts that they NEVER, EVER learned and that are so inconvenient to Our Ideology. We can just go and tell them whatever we want, and they 'believe it like it's a religion' -- job done. Just dredge out an old song from the 1920s and clap on it a bunch of lilty lyrics bashing earlier generations who "won’t be around much longer anyway, and have nothing at all to say". Both Communists and Nazis did EXACTLY the same. Nothing new here. "It's a 'repeat' / just a 'repeat'". Only those who lack historical memory can actually fall for this kind of tired old sloganeering. "Dědeček a babička / ujídají z chlebíčka" (Eastern Europe, 1948-1950) (paraphrasable in English rhyme as "Grandpa and grandma [are almost dead] / [no 'social' utility in letting them] eat bread")! We win!!! Back to the 1920s!! << This way, xyzJugend! << / sarc off / Yes, quite so, really, just so ... and above all stop thinking like a sober and rational expert and a highly skilled realist with top qualifications. Of course, quite so.

The above trick is so hoary, so ancient, so Savonarola, so Children's Crusade, that it does not even make sense to hide this ... already the Jesuits, for instance, entirely candidly advertised their savvy manipulation of youths and children. Yes, already the Jesuits (and innumerable earlier 'saintly' operatives) were aware of the power of such basic agit-prop tools as "child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of ... attitudes or behaviours from children to parents" and were also quite well aware that "daughters appear(ed) to be especially effective in influencing parents" ('findings' published in May 2019, not fully referenced here in order not to really embarrass the rather large author team). You deem you have 'discovered' something new here? Oh really, really? Every single missionary and cult propagandist that ever lived has used these exact techniques, and has been aware of them for millennia, entire millennia. The technique was also quite standard in the USSR. Perhaps reading some Makarenko, in Russian, might be a very good idea? Or Johann Gottlieb Fichte in German? And of course all the pathetic 'expert' pap seeking to leverage 'intergenerational learning' in order to make children 'guide' their parents and relatives away from 'dangerous conspiracy theories' is always invariant and reaches all the way back to some lovely Fascist, Stalinist, Jesuit and other precedents. Along the lines of: "How can you explain to your parents or to your crazy uncle Bob that the Government [Ministry, Movement, Organization, Sect, Police, etc.] is correct? Is Uncle Bob spreading misinformation in the family group chat room [meeting, at dinner, in the pub, in the garage, on a nature walk]? How can you act when you hear Uncle Bob say very strange stuff that may come from an untrusted website you never heard of [or from underground literature, Samizdat, Resistance flyer, evil sectarian pamphlet, etc.]? Do not be angry. Educate and help your crazy Uncle Bob. Here is a list of our approved resources you can tell your parents to read. Explain calmly that this is the only Truth. Hand them our Party's authoritative expert brochure [brochure from the Ministry of Love, our easy to understand Party flyer, our Newspeak list of approved words, our latest Politburo motivational booklet, latest Encyclical, latest message from the General of our Order -- or from those renowned and lavishly decorated Party scientists, etc.]."

The entirely predictable and invariant cant and the abysmal hypocrisy are ageless. Just Inquisitorial boilerplate, vapid and sophistic like any such purported 'conversation' throughout the long history of planet Earth. But then, yes, one ought to feel some compassion for Grand Inquisitors, probably, possibly. Their lot is so hard and thankless. They hardly get paid anything at all -- only six figures and more, and robes, and coaches, and meals, and assistants, and perquisites, and ... . They studied the law very hard and they toil under a heavy expert prosecutorial burden of circuitous decision-making, weighing what could and could not and can and cannot be uttered -- and how and by whom and when and for what purpose and with what possible hidden and evil intent (so that pragmatically and equitably they might signal with all possible gravitas meriting a hefty bonus : "the link you tried to visit goes against our community standards"). As they toiled before they toil now, in closed and not so very closed committees, not only in the "Oh, Semantics" room. They toiled with supreme and quiet desperation and a sense of pragmatic and equitable urgency already after the 1470s, as they faced the proliferation of despicable movable type print. Great and magnanimous and enlightened pragmatism they displayed. By the sixteenth century, there already was, by the standard of that bygone era's 'information processing' technology, “a system at maximum scale, with very imperfect information”.

People suddenly wrote too much and printed too much and thought too much and they were mere 'rubes', a word whose origins and thus context go much further back than the 19th or 18th century -- let us remember here St Augustine's De Catechizandis Rudibus. If St Augustine lived today, he would undoubtedly have included instructional sections dealing with the recalcitrant pagan rustics' "emotionality, ignorance", sections about "investment" in incorrect thought, about the pernicious rustic "bonding in communal rooms" of smoky and lice-infested countryside hovels to keep telling misleading old tales or listen to someone read error-filled fragments of heathen authors, about the insidious communal "pagan surveillance" that perpetuates evil superstitions, etc. -- in terms of the core mechanisms that are at play here, very little has changed at all between the year 400 and 2020 when you think about it soberly. By 1550, it already was a grinding and daunting chore to read by candlelight all the newly proliferating suspect material and to decide what should get an Inquisitorial imprimatur, which wrongly permitted book should be burned to enhance the 'safety' of minds, and which book or flysheet would earn a place in the eternal Index Librorum Prohibitorum compiled by the Sacred Congregation of the Index. The fate of the universe, the very fate of the heavens depended on the Inquisitor's untiring discernment -- what if someone should start thinking outside the box? What if someone broke the 'consensus'? The scientia 'is settled', it is 'universal' and not to be questioned. Right? WRONG!

"The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed." (Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize Lecture [Literature], 2005)

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." (George Orwell, 1984, Part 3, chap. 3). Who speaks here? In fact, it really does not matter all that much: Orwell was quite right -- ideologies are all too often just window-dressings for the age-old 'urge to power and money', regardless of the political symbology's advertised yummy flavours, the content, the verbiage, the purported 'beneficent' goals, the 'righting of the wrongs', the multiple 'bendings of the Arc of the Universe', the "You don't think I have power? I have power now. Lots of!". But, for the sake of the argument, let us simply ask again: Who speaks here? Inquisitor? Witch-hunter? Gestapo officer? An eighteen-year-old sectarian 'Elder' who has painstakingly memorized all of three double-spaced 12-point-font pages of painfully standard talking points? Sixteen-year-old indoctrinated would-be actress? Juvenile nepotistically appointed Cardinal "wise beyond his years"? Eighteen-year-old People's Commissar? Brother Number One (Pol Pot)? Политический руководитель (Politruk)? Crooked AG? Crooked Supreme Court Judge? Crooked High Priest? Power-hungry Gaia Devotee? "Benevolent and farsighted" leader of a "revolutionary suicide" People's Temple commune of pure 'Love'? Comrade "Smash Them to Pieces" Duch of the Cambodian Santebal? Student aficionado of "struggle sessions" and "clear and aggressive response(s)" to whatever the declared thoughtcrime and wrongthink of the day might be? A vocal advocate of the "pedagogy of fear" or "pedagogy of discomfort"? -- (oh yes, yes, let that pure sheer pedagogical 'Love' flow as you have a thrilling and consciousness-raising [adrenaline-high] Struggle Session moment that takes you back to those glorious 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution years with all the exciting public abuse, kangaroo tribunals, torture, forced labor, political mockery, beatings, confiscations, and random ideologically driven killings). Or perhaps we hear the 'loving' voice of the great coryphaeic Ioseb "Soso" ("Koba") Besarionis dze [or Besarionidze] Jughashvili (just in that name, do we have odd echoes here of Βασίλειος Βησσαρίων (Bessarion) and the Comneni, or of something else yet?). Or perhaps a Jan van Batenburg, convinced that violence against those not within the sect is divinely ordained and an act of 'loving justice'? Or perhaps a 'keenly aware' arriviste and Conscientious HR Manager? Or perhaps a superbly dogmatic and careerist low-level boffin from the super-newest multi-million dollar Department of "XYZ" [fill the blank at will] Compliance and Full Spectrum Transparency and Never-Before-Seen Accountably Very Accountable Openness? So difficult to tell whether there is any difference at all, as soon as one gazes through the eyes of those at the receiving end of all that magnificent authoritative zeal to engineer the behaviour of mere standard humans.

Let us thus call such a properly 'problematized' gaze the "gaze of the ideologically designated ('listed behaviour') heretics" -- to match the terminology of all the other identified and listed 'gazings' and 'gazes'. Of course, be aware that should you 'gaze' in some such heretical manner -- or in any conceivable 'gaze-like' manner (exactly the same subjectively fluid drivel as 'gun-like' gesture, 'heretic-like' utterance, 'non-compliance-like' posture or way of walking, 'free-speech-like' harmful verbalization, which in the eyes of some apparently = violent assault, 'non-Submission-like' reasoning, or 'amateur-like' research, etc.), and should you display any signs of other 'wrongthink' or of utterly rational and fact-based and independent, highly qualified, realist, and truly critical thought (as in 'critical', not as in mere 'critique'), you are probably guilty of some sort of 'trafficking' in wrong ideas. You can therefore presumably be arrested for 'trafficking', if 'trace-like' elements of 'listed wrongthink' are found in your writing or of course in 'your DNA'. The fraudulent totalitarian and authoritarian operational vocabulary is already fully in place. "They should not tell everything they’re going to do. Like, if you are going to [do XYZ], wait until you get elected and then [do it]. Don’t tell them ahead of time!” (i.e. a candid recommendation that representatives deliberately ought to lie in order to achieve pre-set ideological goals -- that they should run on a deceptive 'platform' and get 'elected' on utterly false pretences. By the way, nothing new here at all. Ancient, so very ancient. Let us run exactly the same, in earlier versions: "“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us” (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 'Lenin'); "You do not endorse Stalin. You do not call yourself a Communist. You do not call upon people to support the Soviets. Never. You claim [instead] to be an independent-minded idealist. You [pretend you] don't really understand politics ... ." (Babette Gross, 1989). Or in newer versions: "So we call our process something else [than it really is], such as comprehensive planning, growth management, or smart growth" (Gary Lawrence, 1998); or "From a political standpoint, a more opaque policy is actually superior … [because] you have no idea how much it costs. Politicians can argue that it’s costing a lot, but other people can argue the opposite … Opaque policies should be easier to enact and safer [sic] once implemented." (A. Dessler). Which takes us back to the utter "invariance" of maskirovka or political / ideological crypsis, whether the context is ostensibly 'religious' or ostensibly 'political' or ostensibly 'scientific' or ostensibly 'ideological'. Always the same crypsis. Always on message. Always the same tactical pretending, 100% baked in.)

Do you still remember "il est interdit d'interdire?" 1968? We choose to throw this with boundless delight in the face of all the sanctimonious and double standard would-be censors of today who, in point of fact, often happen to be the lineal thought-children of all the 1968ers. So, remember. "IL EST INTERDIT D'INTERDIRE." It was your predecessors -- and ours -- who said it. Live with it, then. Live up to it, too, if you still can. Otherwise you are rank hypocrites. Look in the mirror! Look in there! See what you have become! See the shadows behind your outline. See if you can at all confront that distorted face! You are not committed to a lofty principle, but to purely circumstance-driven partisan political expediency. The same as every single totalitarian or Bonapartist before you. No difference. None at all. You simply are hungry for absolute raw power, by any means necessary. This, exactly this, is why the Review refuses to Bowdlerize submitted manuscripts and does not hire and pay any 'sensitivity proof-readers'. We let research go wherever it wants and needs to go, in pursuit of accurate and realistic data, realistic linkages, logical interpretations, probing and realistic models. They may go this way -- and they may go that way. We do not deem to have the prescience to prejudge. We, at least, do not view ourselves as omnipotent Cardinal-Inquisitor guardians of a 'purity of word and thought and intent' embedded in only one ideology that has already decided which way the Arc of History must bend.

Ideological (i.e. to all intents and purposes religious) censorship was abolished in the past for a very good reason. And if some attempt to reintroduce it today, then the Review shall do its part in the battle to abolish it all over again, and again. Those who celebrate ideological censorship as a "historic victory" will fail. Inquisitors, censors, those who are hell bent on imposing a specific worldview on others, are ultimately few compared to the overwhelming majority of living human beings. A tiny group by comparison. Just like Gestapo agents were in fact rather few and relied more on their sinister image and reputation than on a tangible omnipresent power to coerce 24/7. Censorship machineries, no matter how many agents they hire, are always ultimately run by a rather limited number of people who are either ideologically fanaticized or are going with the flow because it seems to them that this is the way things are going to be anyway and they might as well have a career, a job, a 'position', 'be safe' by becoming an obedient and abjectly servile cog in the machine. They can be fought. Their apparent power can be broken. And it will be broken ... Where to start. Hmmmm. Maybe a Banned Book of the Month Reading Club based well outside the reach of any current Censorship System? By the way, where does the word "fanatic", as in ideologically fanaticized, come from? Yes, you know it but you refuse to think about it -- fanaticus (from fanum) -- a zealotic devotee in the service of a shrine.

The Review consequently contests and utterly rejects all quasi-judicial interference in pure research and teaching. Ideologically or doctrinally propelled interference with scholarship is fully the equivalent of Stalinist communism, Nazism, fascism in all its forms, the Inquisition, sorcery trials, and all other forms of authoritarian thought control. What is manifestly inconsistent with universal human rights? It is compelled speech. It is compelled thought. Court-ordered compulsion to 'celebrate' and 'embrace' one single worldview, forever, simply is totalitarian. Compelled adherence to and mandatory political and behavioural 'conversion' to specific worldviews is totalitarian. Shall we continue? More of what can logically be deemed totalitarian? How about behavioural stick-and-carrot social engineering implemented by ideologues who declare their narrative and only their narrative to be true, amid rounds of endless officious collective 'critique'. Their own stance, however, is naturally exempt from being as much as mentioned in any context that might be deemed critical. By fiat. "Some animals are more equal than others."

Fortunately, dogmatic ideological totalitarianism does not seem to be able to assert itself 'forever'. Pessimistically, Orwell wrote: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever". One slogan that used to be endlessly posterized on giant fluttering banners all across Eastern Europe after 1945 proclaimed "Shoulder to shoulder with the USSR for All Eternity!" 'Eternity', curiously enough, did not really manage to last even a measly 44 years (1945-1989). People unexplainably woke up. The banners? Some appear to remain in some museums somewhere. Still, the Orwellian image is quite potent and like honey for various addictive types who populate the corridors, air ducts, sewers, attics, basements and crawl-ways of potential power: What we have here below, originally intended as a warning, has now been turned into a blueprint for the Future by powerful forces:

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever” (George Orwell)

Thought-, speech-, or behaviour-modification through violent means and against conscientious objection is a crime, regardless of the verbiage and disingenuous legalese that is deployed in order to camouflage it. Legal or theological norms that seek to enforce such compulsion may legitimately be deemed corrupt, null and void. It is unacceptably extremist to target ideologically or legally, to single out, shame, non-platform, shout down, control, profile, police, expose to trumped-up charges, demonize, or judicially suppress reasoned scholarly arguments that are presented calmly and are supported by fully disclosed and accessible evidence. But of course, not that any such paltry issues would ever stop anyone bent on pursuing the Orwellian 'stamping boot' mirage. On the contrary, they seem to provide an added thrill. All those who fail to comply will presumably be arrested immediately and without warrant by any Officer of the Polizeistaat who surmises to have so-called reasonable and probable grounds. For those who do not idolize the 'stamping boot' Orwellian image, a commitment to academic free speech, accompanied by an active and vigorous distrust of all ideologies, is however not a "mental disease" or "perversion." It is not "ignorance." It does not mean that the one who espouses such a commitment is in need of further "education" or needs to be psychoanalyzed -- or arrested without warrant. On the contrary. It most often means that the one who espouses such a commitment is already very highly or even superbly educated, or otherwise skilled -- certainly much more so than the would-be arresting Officer -- and above all capable of independent advanced thought and reasoning (something not at all certain in the case of Polizeistaat muscle). Thus, resistant to crass, simplistic, ex cathedra indoctrination and blatant ideological 'moulding'. That of course, when coupled with a dose of courage and conscience, tends to make the 'evildoer' "engage in expressions of rejection" of the prescribed and judicially imposed ideology.

Children, very unfortunately, are much more vulnerable and susceptible to all sorts of manipulation -- they do not possess yet the required intellectual defences and well formed arguments -- and that is exactly why various indoctrination projects have always ultimately decided to focus on moulding the minds of children. As did the Jesuits, for instance, even though it is disputed whether the all too notorious and fitting "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man" really ought to be attributed to St Ignatius of Loyola or whether it was Voltaire who managed to associate the saying with the name of the Jesuit. And of course, even worse, the very same principle was applied both in the USSR and in Socialist Eastern Europe as well as in the Third Reich: "When an opponent says ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already ...​You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community". The underlying assumption always is that the child is a mere constructivist "blank slate" and that any ideology, any cult, any programming, any preference whatsoever can be 'inscribed' on it. The child will never know what happened to it. It will be totally indoctrinated.

Then you get your dream 'useful idiot' tool: 1984 ThinkPol and its use of children. As in Winston’s neighbor Parsons, an obnoxious Party toadie, ending up getting 'reported' to the Thought Police by his own child, who hears him commit a thought crime while he talks in his sleep. “It was my little daughter .... She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?” (1984, George Orwell) [NB: WARNING! NOT A FICTION! In the current era of 'political correctness', this already IS the world we live in. Full on, 100%. Face it. And then do everything you possibly can to bring that ThinkPol world crashing down. Hard. As hard as one can contrive.]

There is a snag, you see. Advocates of "Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community" are unfortunately ignoring the well documented fact that many, for instance, of those schooled by the Jesuits then became foremost Protestants or free-thinkers or hard-bitten secularists when they grew up and began to think for themselves. When they revolted against all the blatant manipulation. Many 'Young Pioneers' and child 'Sparks' became staunch foes of Communism when they grew up and discovered they no longer could logically stomach the indoctrination pap. And so on. Examples from all historical eras and contexts abound. The more one force-feeds a preferred ideology all across the system, the more the purported "blank slate" is eventually going to revile you, revile you with all the energy that one can muster, for all you have done. Viscerally so. It namely is not as 'blank' as you would love to think, especially when it comes to fundamentals. Not at all, even though the 'educator's' delusion on the subject is endless. The child will eventually turn against you and your ideology with supreme fury, especially as it will be well versed in all your ideological talking points and will heartily detest every single sly and lilting slogan that you forced it to parrot and every inane 'compliance test' you made it take -- yes, you will have managed to produce the perfect renegade. Which is good and normal. "There is a tide in the affairs of men" ("Julius Caesar," Act IV, Scene III) [NB: For every propagandist or ideologue, 'education' is merely a synonym for crude 'indoctrination' -- and it has been so for a long time, many hundreds of years into the past. Pragmatic propagandists and proselytizers of all ilks and eras and all systems and all faiths and all 'donation-and-alms-and-Temple/Party-management' ideologies have always detested any 'education' that fosters independent humanist and pro-human thought, even though they might loudly affirm the contrary. As a matter of fact, especially when they do affirm the contrary. Maskirovka. BAMN.]

Then, of course, the indoctrinators will in turn detest the 'product' that has turned against them. And they will assume or at least pretend rhetorically that the 'product' must thus be 'defective' -- mad. Let us never forget that high-sounding, arrogant, and contemptuous charges of "mental disease" or "madness" -- or transparently politicized and merely protocol- or 'profile'-based charges of “mental health issues" -- were deployed against all sorts of dissenters in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and during the worst stages of Communist history, as well as in other totalitarian contexts, modern, pre-modern, and ancient, secular, religious as well as zealotically sectarian. The 'suspected mental issues' are of course generally made up, cooked up, 'engineered' for political purposes. They are mere specious pseudo-professional psychoanalytic twaddle in obedient service to ever-recurrent variations on the Matrix, the Inquisition, the Little Council, the Star Chamber, the Hub, the List, the Consensus, whatever you might conceivably want to call any similar mechanism / institution in any cultural context. One may thus be tempted to say that true madness -- as opposed to this politically fabricated 'madness' -- is the insistence of totalitarian cultures, subcultures, movements, cells, and institutions that people ought to collude in patent lies and 'embrace' those lies by regurgitating them obediently. The insistence that the mere act of asking questions is 'depraved' and should expose one to societal revulsion and ostracism. Only pretending that one has bought into the 'consensus' guarantees in these contexts a little bit of temporary and entirely illusory safety and then eventually, perhaps, if the sham is credible, a bit of fulsome praise for one's 'life and so-called accomplishments' (with medals, awards, etc.). In other words, there is 'madness' and 'Madness' -- one is politically approved, the other is not. So, now, what 'madness' is involved when clearly provable data and factual evidence are presented but the presenter is pilloried and 'cancelled' and the data are blankly and vapidly ignored? Just asking ...

"You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. [NB: It indeed is. But those who want to ensnare minds, Gnostic-like, of course affirm that 'narrative' automatically , always, and everywhere overrules all and any conceivable evidence and that, therefore, whatever happens to be expedient for an ideological project is inherently the 'truth and nothing but the truth', without any need for proof, and that it must be 'affirmed' as such, or else]. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. [NB" In other words, 'reality' is purely subjective and can be simply imposed, politically and ideologically.] Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth [NB: Which is rather amusing if one considers 'truth' to be nothing but 'bourgeois sentimentalism' and 'social construct', right? In other words, what one does not like is a 'social construct', but once it has become the Party's 'social construct' you can go to jail for trying to 'deconstruct' it]. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party [NB: 'correct lenses', 'optics', and 'reframing']. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane ... " (George Orwell, 1984, Part 3, Chapter 2) [NB: Welcome to the Borg Collective. Welcome to The Hive. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated and indoctrinated. If you do not comply, a "Citizens Assembly" (of course supported by "Major Donors and Very High Net Worth Individuals") will ensure that in 'sortitions' for offices your 'token' or 'scrip' never makes it into the jar (or whatever) from which lots are drawn -- you will be pre-'sortitioned' out. Funny, that 'sortition' thing, whether one looks at the Florentine 'scrutiny' or the Venetian brevia, etc. "Drawn by lot" sounds so 'equal'. Except everything depends on whose 'token' gets into the 'bag' or whose name gets on the 'list'-- and how. Oh, the fine tricks that were played to get names into the 'scrutiny bags' or to keep them out -- as well as to pad or prune the lists! Ultimately, as if by strange magic, it was the correct families or the suitable people whose 'tokens' were drawn by 'impartial' lot. Rest assured that your 'token' -- if you are still alive, that is -- will not be in the jar once it has been determined that you appear to be ideologically 'incompatible' with the Shining New Order that will come after an 'inevitable' collapse caused by "stored up crisis" (formerly known as "structural contradictions" or "structural conflict theory", but that had to be 'softened', 'transformed', 'reframed' and 'edited out' for 'outreach and messaging purposes'] ... That is and always has been the real project of those who advocate any form of ultimate and eternal 'Submission', under whatever label (the actual labels do not really matter and are just ghafla, sudden and fleeting distraction). A Submission that holds the expendable râya, the ra`aya, the 'members of the flock' -- i.e. the Sheeple -- weak, defenceless, scared and confused ('State of Fear'). That keeps them compliant and shorn or even better, in a perennial state of conveniently self-shearing imbecility, and in voluntary obedience to a 'Priestly', 'Managerial', 'Vanguard', 'Leadership', 'Technocrat', 'Inspired', 'Visionary', etc., Inner Party Core caste [terms are utterly interchangeable and numerous, just take your pick]. An obedience that of course has to be enforced by a legion of 'officers' -- a PolitRuk, a KultKom [cultural commissar], a Block Confidant [that inconspicuous person who (a) does no ostensibly useful work, (b) lives in the ground floor State-paid apartment of your 'living quarters' block, (c) is always there -- peering through a thin gap between curtains or through a peep-hole, and watches your every move [the latter function has now been replaced by surveillance cameras and recording devices that you voluntarily put inside your living quarters because they are 'cool'], etc. Because the râya, you see, cannot be trusted to keep in a state of having 'embraced' what needs to be 'embraced' and cannot be trusted to keep on 'affirming' what needs to be 'affirmed'. It needs a Sheep Dog caste. 'Consciousness' cannot be just 'raised' -- it has to be kept 'raised' artificially and constantly, thus providing a cushy living for a sizeable caste of virtual 'control knobs' -- 'control knob' being defined here as someone who produces nothing in terms of goods or practical services or new knowledge but functions purely as an ideological replicator that is also tasked with adjusting and 'reframing' the rules of the ideology's Game or with inventing new 'rules' so that the râya would be kept confused and on its toes and happily 'affirming' the proper Party Line. But then, be of good cheer! There is good news -- all of this is nothing new. The State of Fear mind-trick has been deployed throughout millennia to control people and their wallets, fields, grain storage bins, means of defence, livestock, ponds, fishing weirs, and what have you. It delivers sterling value and it works. One of the really good historical Ponzi schemes -- namely indulgences -- has of course been vastly surpassed by modern guilt-casting Ponzi and donation and propaganda schemes ... It was such a beautiful scheme, though, back in its time! You do want to buy a worthless piece of paper to save your purportedly lecherous uncle from suffering in Purgatory, do you not? Surely you do! It is a very innovative instrument, also known as 'spiritual insurance', and it can be readily sold and resold as 'valuable paper' or even used as scrip money if simply made out to 'the bearer of this certificate'. A sort of French Revolutionary assignat, but using the Divine and a 'treasury of merit' as monetary reserve Guarantor instead of a large pool of politically confiscated biens nationaux. But let us not mourn such old ideas here. Novel forms can always be invented easily and messaged and monetized. You know, such as selling to those who are ideologically 'impure' and also 'poltically incorrect' all those tasty dispensation credits earned and monetized by those who are paragons (fake) of ideological purity. And entire new fake economies can be created around these novel forms of guilt trading. Perhaps a 'guilt' Stock Exchange, under the auspices and control of the SEC? So let us reduce this to the crude basics -- the underlying and utterly fundamental concept of 'sheeple', râya. It goes back into the mist of time, well into the BCE era, into the era of ziggurats and of clay seals, the era of temple economies, temple treasuries, 'hydraulic despotism', and so on. Obviously, many are those who dream of bringing all of this back, so that they could rule from behind a screen and through the screen [NB: pun fully intended], for the hidden and real sacred face of the Emperor of Emperors must not be 'gazed' at. Yes, banish all these impertinent 'gazes', and all reason. Banish all humanism, and all anthropocentrism, and all of that execrable and heretical and impertinent and irritating reason-driven freedom to speak ... . You must quake and fear for your life in the presence of Those Who Know Better and Have the Correct Ideology (Dogma), oh ye who vilely reek of Humanity! 'Embrace' only Total Submission, through "... submissiveness as the prerequisite. The ... fundamental policy is 'Forced Labor as a means, while Thought Reform is our basic aim'". As time passed, all of this became a key dividing line between ways of being. A non-negotiable dividing line:
     "Who is the lord and shepherd of their flock?" asks the Queen Mother of Persia.
       And the answer is "They are not slaves, they bow to no man's rule" (Aeschylus).
       [SARC ON/  Hmmmm ... clearly the ones who gave this answer did not realize the
       imputed benefits of having a 'Beloved Leader' picked by Inner Core 'sortition'
       from among the Major Donors and High Net Worth Individuals. /SARC OFF]

There is exquisite method in the apparent madness, of course. All of it is a giant and systematic Pavlovian compliance test. One becomes trapped if one can effectively be induced to say "war is peace", "peace isn’t the absence of war", "health isn’t the absence of sickness", "death is life-giving", "freedom is slavery", "ignorance is strength", "banned speech means safety ", "rationality is aggression", "obedience is independence", "compliance is freedom", "two and two equals five ... or three, or two, or one, exactly as the Party says, a 'Party', whatever Party". One becomes conceptually trapped if one can be made to mumble like a mantra such mind-numbing oxymorons as "oppressive freedom", "repressive tolerance", "free expression is unsafe ", "negative growth" (a priceless non-sequitur!), or a true gem: "degrowth" / "décroissance" (priceless -- mandatory Party 'optics management' of course absolutely forbids saying anything like 'contraction' or 'shrinking' or 'decline' or engineered 'regression' or 're-feudalization' or 'impoverishment', so it is necessary to 'unword' such words and invent new pseudo-words in a pathetic euphemistic corporate/Party-style Newspeak (Neo-Language) that resembles the snoddy pronouncements of the 'superior' 'non-rube' Optimen in The Eyes of Heisenberg. Thus we get the 'safely' beautiful and very appealing and surely 'ethical' "degrowth": it still has 'growth' in it, but it is 'de-', just like that ridiculous rube-enticing $ 19.99 price tag). And of course one is never 'unemployed' or 'out-of-work' or down-and-out' -- one can only be "unwaged" [NB: Gee, is this something like "self-partnered" or "sologamous"?]. No one will notice what things really are, the purveyors of such linguistic pseudo-gems think, as long the Loyal PR Corps spraypaints reality with mind-stopping oxymorons. And then there is of course "negative interest rate " ... Or even "quantitative tightening [in economics] is not 'quantitative' tightening" [NB: You could make all this stuff up, but unfortunately it is all too 'real']. If you can be induced to repeat voluntarily such worthless twaddle day in day out, if you can be induced to write such worthless twaddle for a pittance of money because your next swig of ultra-nutritious Soylent slurp depends on it (and presumably also your Nobel Prize of one sort or another), then you are already more than half broken. If then you become effectively enmeshed in an existential race (safeguarding one's job, ranking, etc.) and must keep complying with arrayed conceptual dissonances of Newspeak deliberately pulsed at a high institutional frequency, each one more terminologically twaddly and Humpty-Dumpty-nonsensical than before, all mental moorings being to erode ... and then snap. Then it is enough to just 'internalize' the notion that you had better 'embrace' and 'affirm' a specific narrative, specific prescribed oxymorons, and we are straight inside the domain of Bernaysian malleability. Siegmund Freud and his double-nephew, "The Father of Spin", Edward Louis Bernays (1891−1995) [NB: Ouch, spin doctors evince such longevity, not even in the mere intellectual sense but in the 'real' -- is there some sort of 'preserving' substance in pure nonsensical 'spin'?]. A point is reached where if one falls in line for the next 'article of faith', and the next after that, one will fall in line for just about anything at all. Autonomous sovereign selfhood is obliterated. And that was the real goal all along -- boiling the frog slowly until it cannot summon any will to jump out of the pot. The Long March through the Institutions. "He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken ... He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (George Orwell, 1984). For the spin-master, this of course is merely business as usual -- by any means necessary ... BAMN ... spin, rinse, repeat ... Who was it that rather recently said something along the lines of: "Whether you sell 'movements' or 'products' it's all the same ... just business ...". We better not even go there, right? Just do not forget to use "semantics" as a smoke screen -- good ol' Bernays first called this entire business venture 'propaganda' (but quite frankly that sounded a little too much like the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, which had already been around for quite a while -- a trifle embarrassing for a Brave New (and presumably 'Disruptive') Innovation in mass-management psychology). It was therefore suitably 'reframed' as 'public relations' (PR). And then further 'reframed' as 'outreach', 'conversation', etc. ...

"The conscious and intelligent [NB: Here is where we beg to differ, in the light of the preceding paragraph on oxymorons] manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate the unseen mechanisms of society constitute an invisible government [NB: an integral part of the Deep State, no matter how much some people wish to deny the very concept of 'Deep State'] which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical way in which our democratic society is organized [NB: a reality-control mechanism also known as 'Wag the Dog']. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society… in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons [aka Influencers] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind" (Edward Bernays, 1928) [NB: A sheer, utter, abysmal contempt for 'the masses' and for anyone who is not an 'insider' is on lavish Technicolor and Smell-o-Rama display here. None of this is of course exclusive to Bernays' "... our democratic society". Every system throughout history has always had its agitprop mannikins behind the curtain and its would-be Emperors of Emperors who "pull the wires". The more totalitarian and the more dogmatic the system, the more obnoxious and conceited and unbearably pompous the Golgafrinchan fringe of hyper-valorized elite "influencer" mannikins -- oh, so sorry, we apologize for this verbal infraction: "... the small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the [mere] masses." Simply, the battle is on -- just like it was during the long historical Protetstant vs. Catholic wars of religion, for example -- for who owns your mind: you, a government, a corporation, an organization (including universities) or one of the key militant ideologies. None of them want you to think for yourself and by yourself and to develop any real habit of independent thought. All of them want to do the thinking for you, BAMN, including compulsion through laws and brute force."]

On a more pedestrian level, the more obvious and ridiculous the lie, doctrinal tenet, or article of faith that one is required to parrot mindlessly in order to stay 'in', the better it works as a weeding-out mechanism. It ruthlessly weeds out all the rationalists and independents who have a fairly low tolerance for nonsense and for career-crawling mendacity and simply cannot force themselves to play the game past a certain level of obvious cognitive dissonance. Secondly, the more egregious the nonsense that one is compelled to affirm -- compelled by the wish to stay alive, earn a salary, have some sort of career, feed oneself, lead at least a pathetic simulacrum of what might pass for 'normal' life -- the greater the power of the totalitarian system or subsystem ... and of its loyal enforcers and servants. Such power is utterly intoxicating. There is nothing its temporary holders would not do in order to keep it and to increase it. Every assertion of 'power' gives them a huge dopamine fix. By getting 'affirmed' they become ever more addicted. Plus, it all has been made very easy -- changing or completely reversing the fundamental meaning of words now requires no knowledge of any silly grammar or any other silly knowledge -- the "power of certain words" is just, like, "they are, like, powerful" -- that is all anyone needs to know. Any other so-called knowledge is 'harmful'. Oh, wait ... it is also necessary to believe the absolute everlasting truth of all of the above, of course -- or 'else' (that 'else' refers to the ubiquitous mechanism of (1) fraudulent anonymous denunciation, (2) false in-person accusation, (3) utterly rigged 'investigation', (4) dismissal from employment, (5) ostracism (6) 'termination').

All this is nothing more than yet another shining instance of the tried and tested ancient techniques of totalitarian reality-control (Orwell, 1984), which can be fairly well subsumed under the concept of Alice in Wonderland mind control and/or interrogation protocol (see elsewhere on this page): e.g. Caligula's horse, the naked King's 'new robes', or Zhao Gao's (died 207 BC) zhǐ lù wéi mǎ. "Look your Majesty, what a fine horse". Fraudulent and manipulative distortion of reality, anyone? Never mind that the animal that Zhao Gao's servants have just dragged into the palace courtyard genuinely is only a wild deer. Nothing but a wild deer. Manifestly, zoologically and biologically, a wild deer in every single respect. You are required by someone else's high judicial mandate to 'embrace' the notion that the deer truly is a horse, and to 'affirm' and 'celebrate' it loudly, regardless of all sensory and scientific evidence, against all sober reason, against all substantive knowledge, against the very fabric of tangible and readily provable reality itself. You need to think, obviously, beyond the 'incorrect' and 'retrograde' idea that deer are not horses. Anything that Zhao Gao says, anything at all, is TRUE! Zhao Gao has power! Lots of it! What we have here (and do remember, we are here in c. 212-210 BC -- which means that this trick was deployed at the very least 2,232 years ago, and surely earlier as well, which makes it very 'forward-looking' and also illsutrates perfectly well why certain factions absolutely detest Realist and Humanistic history) is very simply an abstract ideological allegiance test in the form of a ritual and nonsensical denial of facts, a mandatory political 'oath of submission'. Say it -- zhǐ lù wéi mǎ -- and all of you know very well what Zhao Gao means by that, do you not, wink-wink? And do not ever dare to reify and essentialize horses. There simply are no horses. Horses are simply a 'social construct' (again, remeber that this is 2,232 years ago). All deer are necessarily horses. "Proceed as discussed in your [despotically totalitarian] HR training", or else. The original words in their genuine and specific meaning are not officially banned -- yet -- but do think twice before daring to use them. Employ only the words that are permitted, and never "exhibit verbal non-compliance" when Its Lordship's henchmen address you and check whether you have been sticking to the new "style guide". You know very well that "Truth is not a defense [sic] ...". There simply is no Truth. Truth, no matter how amply provable, is an absolutely irrelevant Social Construct. It does not 'exist'. Only mandates and decrees matter, in any conceivable way. Just like 2,232 years ago! Progress!! In other words -- a Kingdom of Utter Lies. Your 'lack of earnest belief that all deer are horses, your conscientious objection that deer cannot be horses, and your adherence to naively essentialist and incorrect scientific philosophies claiming that deer cannot be horses, are incompatible with the "highest standards of society" (clearly, those of reality-manipulation dating to 2,232 years ago) ... your deeply erroneous realist scientific philosophy does not satisfy the requirements of being worthy of our respect'. Zoology is not worthy of respect, as we all ought to know. It is a wholly superfluous and historiosophically obsolete hegemonic thing. And 'it just can't be allowed to be a thing', y'all. For Thus Spake Saint Herbert Marcuse: you "must be freed from the prejudice of experience and 'mathematization' ... [freed from] any knowledge of mathematics, physics, or any other science -- and [you] must absolutely transcend our present knowledge" (Kolakowski 1978, p. 418). The Great Problem with all of this is that after 2,232 years (and more) it already gets a little boring ...

So, use the mandatory words and terms -- whatever it might be that is arbitrarily mandated from on high -- if you at all value your life and position and well-being. Do it, if you do not want your family and contacts and friends to be doxxed and hounded and falsely accused and labelled and serially 'denounced' and detained and fraudulently 'investigated'. Do it, to avoid being demoted at will (as is "overwhelmingly likely" unless you 'change your views'), do it, to avoid being officially rendered 'unqualified' regardless of how vastly qualified you might be in fact. Never forget that there are no facts, by decree -- only mandatory rulings. Otherwise you will be shunned and 're-educated' and socially obliterated, while having your DNA, fingerprints, and mugshots taken, and your laptop and mobile confiscated and held indefinitely without cause, after being duly tasered in the crotch while you are strapped tight to a chair, by heavily armoured Peace Officers who will subsequently lie about it all the way and who already drool at the heady prospect of becoming a titled and neo-fake-pedigreed nobility, tiny tinpot Lords in a New Feudal World Order. Say it -- whatever it might be, whether it makes sense or not, for you are just one of a herd of servile 'subjects'. Or face the wrath of triumphalist ideological mob-and-robocop-and-utterly-corrupt-judiciary overreach. None of it of course random. It has a purpose. Nothing is namely quite as destructive of a soul, of the very fabric of reasonable society, as being compelled to genuflect in a servile fashion before an objectively manifest lie in order to avoid social retribution and to keep the soul's body gainfully employed, at least part-time -- nothing is quite as demeaning and offensive as having to become a tamed robot in order to keep one's miserable so-called job.

For the record, therefore: a deer simply is NOT a horse. Never will be. Not in thousands of years. Yes, there is a material and non-subjective reality based on objective data, a reality that matters a great deal, and no, the Narrative is not Supreme. No, this is not a mere matter of 'reframing' and 'optics' adjustment. It never will be. Regardless of any governmental, ideological, propagandistic, educational, and corporate PR and HR endeavours. [NB: Oh no! We just committed a 'listed behaviour'! Oh no! We just used historical material dating to the third century BC as an illegal allusion to 'present processes'. I guess we should now arrest ourselves and also send ourselves to some remote GULag on the Ussuri River, after duly self-administering a thoroughly 'constructive' on-campus Confession and Struggle Session. Or maybe we should at the very least voluntarily put ourselves on 'sick leave', before some automaton-like HR 'muscle' tells us: "We put people on it all the time ... People are concerned about you! The cause of your guilt is the content and structure of your thinking."]

All of the above, as already suggested, belongs to an ancient panoply of mind-bending techniques that every single investigator and interrogator ever employed by any system was always perfectly aware of, standard tool-box techniques for breaking down minds and for ensuring total compliance with future commmands as well as an engineered amplification of 'desired' behaviour. The key is to undermine and then destroy any sense of stable 'essentialist' identity. All must appear fluid, bent, uncertain, with no firm point to grasp. The subject must become so 'fluid' that the operator can flip realities upside down easily -- a psychological jiu-jitsu throw that makes the subject passionately want to reject what in fact is in the subject's best essential interest. At that point, the subject truly desires to be 'remade' and thus 'saved'. This is best achieved when the subject begins to believe that nothing is real -- not even the physical body and its attributes. That the subject as such "is not real", but merely a malleable 'construct'. "Jarhead". As soon as the subject begins to doubt the very basics of tangible 'being', of existing as a 'definite' entity with stable characteristics, psychological tipping point is near. If the technique can be applied while the subject is still very young and does not possess a solidly anchored perception of self and the world, breakpoint can be reached very quickly. Sometimes, one single indoctrination session may launch a conceptual cascade that will turn the subject against the self. The implanted notions will never quite go away, and a substantial intellectual effort will be required to negate them. These techniques are now being applied on a society-wide scale, instead of being confined to an 'interview' room or a detention cell. A mere difference of scale. "Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law [NB: What an abject farce, the so-called Law, under such twisted circumstances!] and had them executed instantly. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao." (Shiji, Being The Records of the Grand Historian [Tàishǐ Gōng] Sima Qian) [NB: Do you think even for a split second that Zhao Gao ever believed deer are horses? You have to be joking! It was and still is all about the politics of total power. About 'Submission'. About a State of Fear.]

Once you have 'complied' and uttered the arrogantly required words, you are forever tainted. You namely forever stand and fall with all the scheming Zhao Gaos of this world. Zhao Gao's hungry political ghost owns you and your mind outright. You are a mere expendable sock puppet. Nothing more. Just a ragged and dirty sock puppet, a "useful idiot". When Zhao Gao says "Jump", you will ask with pathetic feeble tremor in your voice: "How high, my great and mighty Lord Prefect of the Gentlemen of the Palace, Your Magnificent Honour, Your Most and Right Honourable Honourful Honoured Honourableness, your august and all-wise and law-learned called-to-the-bar and bar-certified and law-'reframing' Emperor's Counsel (EC) [and also a covert falsifier of testaments, fraudster, common conman, pompous liar, paymaster of assassins, forger of decrees and other papers, obfuscator of evidence, purchaser of slander, fabricator of 'confessions', post-factum 'editor' of interrogation protocols, artful framer of the innocent, and torturer of blameless people]". Keep meditating on that moment of your verbal surrender, of your effete 'verbal compliance' with that "xyz" that "no sane, 'educated', and open-minded person who cares and has nothing to hide could conceivably want to debate because the debate is settled" [NB: Presumably settled 'for ever' -- i.e. an operative conceptual equivalent of things like the old "Side by Side in Brotherhood with the USSR for All Eternity" slogan that was slavishly regurgitated on demand, decades ago, on the eastern side of the former Iron Curtain]. Meditate on that moment of your 'verbal compliance' every single sleepless sweaty night. Contemplate the moment when you turned from a free-thinking Human (Mentally Sovereign Human) and a Sovereign Citizen into a 'social construct' nullity that is physically and ideologically yanked around by the likes of Chancellor Zhao Gao.

This is how it all works -- and has always worked, for a very long time now. Just think of Zhao Gao and 207 BC and then proceed to cross-apply to 2020 [i.e. 2,227 years of the same ideological and legal reality-control garbage]: "... In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army" (attribution redundant -- found easily enough, do your own research, why should we do it for you). Such indeed is the core purpose of creating an easily repeatable and above all blatantly 'nonsensical' ideological credo, a ritual statement, and then compelling all your followers, adherents and wanna-be allyship 'allies' to embrace it with every bit of their unthinking cowed being. It is the ultimate self-licking-ice-cream-cone loyalty oath that any of your enforcer 'line managers' can trot out at any time in order to destroy people and utterly wreck their livelihoods through sheer lying and fraud. Do not think, do not permit any "seeds of doubt" to germinate -- that is the core requirement. Be engulfed by the agitprop: affirm, witness, ally, emote, proclaim, believe, embrace, celebrate, proselytize, for the more you do it while fully aware that there is nothing but a withered mannikin behind the dirty and shop-worn curtain of Oz, the less you will be able to break the hold of Zhao Gao.

"[The] Samizdat [underground publishing community] was riddled with KGB infiltrators and many of its producers and users were discovered. The producers [of unauthorized and uncensored 'dissident' writings and research that failed to meet various official 'Community Standards'], those nocturnal copiers and binders, got prison terms [NB: Not quite happening yet, right now, if one fails to use the latest twists of approved "Newspeak" (Inverted Reality Neo-Language) -- things, however, are just hovering on edge: the current preferred approach is fines, 'disciplinary hearings', targeted 'lawfare', and economic 'deplatforming' or 'unpersoning']. The users, like my parents, would more typically get expelled from their universities [NB: Already happening right now, outside of the former USSR, if one fails to use the latest twists of approved "Newspeak"], fired from their jobs [NB: Already happening right now, outside of the former USSR, if one fails to use proper "Newspeak"], get notes in their ever-present permanent records that would make it impossible for them to find other employment or other places to study [NB: Also happening right now, outside of the former USSR, if one fails to use the latest twists of approved "Newspeak" (Mandatory Neo-Language)]. Quite often, their “privileges” of living in large cities like Kiev or Moscow or Leningrad were revoked and they had to eke out a marginal existence in the [remote] periphery, in Central Asia or in Siberia." (Author Name censored, so that we would not get readily censored, labelled, pigeonholed, and deplatformed -- our apologies)

It would be rather sad for politically 'engaged' psychologists and others of their ilk, today, to step into such millennia-old (at the very least 2,226 years old ... and more), smelly, mouldy, tattered, and thoroughly ideologically tainted shoes (sandals, whatever form of footwear happens to fit any given historical period), and play around with ideologically corrupt notions that label rational dissidence as 'madness'. Just like modern economists, talking heads, and others ought to exercise greater wisdom and refrain from summarily and without further ado branding other thinkers and researchers as well as entire masses of people 'depraved' -- even worse, declaring them to be a "depraved evil”. It really suits them very ill, very ill indeed, when they in fact happen to sound 100%, exactly, syllable for syllable, word for word, as if they were zealotically aspiring to emulate and even surpass the words of ominous Papal documents penned more than 500 years ago. Words likewise ostensibly penned in the name of what is absolutely 'required' and 'demanded' by a solicitude of all-embracing 'Love' and 'Care' -- pastoralis sollicitudinis cura. It suits them ill when their op-eds begin to sound not even 'rather like', but very specifically like: "Innocentius episcopus servus servorum dei [Innocent VIII, December 5, 1484], ad futuram rei memoriam. Summis desiderantes affectibus ["desiring with supreme ardor"], prout pastoralis sollicitudinis cura requirit, ut fides catholica nostris potissime temporibus ubique augeatur et floreat ac omnis heretica pravitas [all heretical depravity] de finibus fidelium procul pellatur, ea libenter declaramus ac etiam de novo concedimus per quem huiusmodi pium desiderium nostrum votivum sortiatur effectum, cunctisque propterea per nostrae operationis ministerium, quasi per providi operatoris sarculum, erroribus extirpatis, eiusdem fidei zelus, et observantia in ipsorum corda fidelium fortius imprimatur". Some have likewise taken to thundering these days about 'extirpating' what their preferred ideologies deem to be 'errors', thundering about 'eradicating' opponents, and thundering about a forced 'imprinting' of zealous ideological 'observance' (consensus) upon the hearts of all ideological 'faithful' ... For the common good, of course, and 'for the children'. Do you see any real difference in the formulations and the pitch? There is none.

Let us never forget the following, for instance: "By the grace of God, Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, and especially commissioned by the Holy Apostolic See as Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity in all of Christendom. // Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, were denounced to this Holy Office in 1615 for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the centre of the world and motionless and the earth moves even with diurnal motion; for having disciples to whom you taught the same doctrine; for being in correspondence with some German mathematicians about it; for having published some letters entitled On Sunspots, in which you explained the same doctrine as true; for interpreting Holy Scripture according to your own meaning in response to objections based on Scripture which were sometimes made to you; and whereas later we received a copy of an essay in the form of a letter, which was said to have been written by you to a former disciple of yours and which in accordance with Copernicus’s position contains various propositions against the authority and true meaning of Holy Scripture; // And whereas this Holy Tribunal wanted to remedy the disorder and the harm which derived from it and which was growing to the detriment of the Holy Faith, by order of His Holiness and the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lord Cardinals of this Supreme and Universal Inquisition, the Assessor Theologians assessed the two propositions of the sun’s stability and the earth’s motions as follows: (1) That the sun is the centre of the world and motionless is a proposition which is philosophically absurd and false, and formally heretical, for being explicitly contrary to Holy Scripture; (2) That the earth is neither the centre of the world nor motionless but moves even with diurnal motion is philosophically equally absurd and false, and theologically at least erroneous in the Faith. // Whereas however we wanted to treat you with benignity at that time, it was decided at the Holy Congregation held in the presence of His Holiness on 25 Feb 1616 that the Most Eminent Lord Cardinal Bellarmine would order you to abandon this false opinion completely." [NB: Guess, you have three tries, who was in fact being entirely and patently and tangibly 'absurd' and 'false' here, despite technically possessing an 'authority' and 'dignity' sanctioned by academic degrees and stellar careers in high offices, further bolstered by the study of law (how else!) and by impeccable legal 'credentials' piled one upon the other miles high. The Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lord Cardinals of the Supreme and Universal Inquisition and the Most Eminent Lord Cardinal Bellarmine predictably had no trouble preferring a Higher 'Truth' to deplorable Facts. By the way, is it not astounding that even in the first third of the 21st century there are literally legions of those who claim they will solely be guided by 'The Science' (meaning ideologically sanctioned theories and interpretations that above all else suit their political programme) and intone the claim as solemnly as the Cardinals who adhered to Aristotelian and theological doctrine, with the solemn implication that 'The Science' is uniform and unequivocal, that only one set of hypotheses and theories can ever be correct, and that 'The Science' is something decided by political vote or by the Courts, or by a 97%-100% consensus among those who support a given ideology or political movement?]

Fortunately, history always judges and it is for the most part not kind at all, certainly not kind to the Zhao Gaos and Berias and Brothers Number One and Most Eminent and Most Reverend Grand Inquisitors and various obsequious familiars of the Inquisition or members of troika tribunals. The wheel of history keeps turning. It makes an ancient grinding sound, like an antique olive or wine press. A crushing sound. Today's would-be Cardinal Bellarmines or members of various Comités de salut public -- all too often self-anointed but even so paid six-figure salaries plus perks -- would be well advised to keep that in mind. History will grind them and their 'allies' and followers to dust, nothing but dust blowing in the desert wind -- thus far history has always managed to accomplish that. Ozymandias. No matter how much they might see themselves as the brilliant vanguard of this or that, they are on the wrong side of history. The wheel turns. You can hear the grinding sound. The fact of the matter is that the better part of the current push for juridicized 'discourse regulation' is deeply rooted in (a) exacerbated and self-serving partisan agendas, (b) totalitarian ideological 'commitment' and self-serving zealotry -- a terrifyingly ubiquitous zhǐ lù wéi mǎ, and (c) varied social engineering programs that are deeply tainted, haunted by the vengeful and hungry ghosts of the millions who died as a direct consequence of ecstatic and zealotic and millennarian experiments with teleological 'Paradises on Earth', of ever-recurring Jonestowns, of trying to cure the bad with the far worse. They are entangled in ostensibly benevolent yet arthritic ideologies, ensnared in the fear of a "pollution of public understanding" that might expose the underlying zhǐ lù wéi mǎ for what it really is. Think independently! Utter Clarity: 2 + 2 = 4 ... not five, not three, not one, not 'whatever the Party says'. Not whichever research result the Party says ought to be keyed into the political messaging. History, archaeology, geology, biology, zoology and other research endeavours seem in this context to be strangely inconvenient to many people, these days, as soon as such endeavours are practised as a sober and realist "fact-mongering". It is wondrous that the acutely 'inconvenienced' ones who see themselves as champions of progress are espousing attitudes and using tactics fully reminiscent of the censoriousness of a Church or of a religious order ...

The Review thus explicitly rejects and does not intend (a) to comply, at its own acknowledged risk, with any corresponding restrictive press laws, or (b) to yield to any online 'shaming' and other bot-swarm attack tactics. The only authority the Review recognizes in terms of publication is that of a free academia as a body of known (as in 'not anonymous' and as in 'not hiding behind multiple Internet pseudo-identities') and demonstrably qualified specialists in each relevant discipline who also are open to hearing and debating diverse approaches and arguments, with courtesy and an open mind.

The Review maintains that courts of law and tribunals intrinsically lack the requisite specialist and methodological qualifications, combined with demonstrably earned direct and hands-on experience in multiple highly specific disciplines -- supported by a manifest and sustained publication record, that would allow them to produce fundamental scholarly or scientific findings of fact across the span of intellectual endeavours ... or to explicate in terms of scholarly and scientific substance the issues and contradictions arising from raw data, their processing, and related analytical issues. They therefore intrinsically lack all and any credible competency to adjudicate among competing research findings -- laws and by-laws to the contrary notwithstanding.

Even worse than 'legal' interference is of course an implicit ideological determination by banks or payment processors, for instance, to apparently determine what research various authors or specialists might or might not release to the public, and in what specific terms they may speak -- an implicit determination enacted through selective denial of payment-processing services ("we do not like what you think -- stop payment"). A bank, credit card company, or insurance company has no business determining whether discrete ideas or sets of ideas or entire professional worldviews are intrinsically 'right' or 'wrong'. A publicly listed and traded company has exactly zero moral right to 'approve' or 'reject' specific forms of reasoned thought. Otherwise such firms entirely cease to be public limited businesses in any legal sense, and simply become avowed branches of a strictly partisan and nakedly political strife machinery. Thus authoritarian, repressive, and deliberately hostile. The argument of course is that "we are private businesses and we have the right to refuse to do business with whomever we dislike" (but of course the very same stance becomes 'evil' and an abuse of human rights when adopted by anyone who is not of Our Faction). The problem is of course that 'banning' and 'de-banking' accounts as part of clear ideological and political chicanery, and consequently 'withholding' / 'freezing' funds in the accounts for a specified or unspecified number of days while the intermediary in question still earns interest on the sums in question or carries the sums on its balance sheet is outright theft with deliberate forethought -- nothing but political gangsterism. The fact that the SEC approves does not make it right -- it only creates a good reason to thoroughly redraw the SEC's mandate and constraints, to prevent pure ideology from dictating transactions.

The issue of overt financial totalitarian tyranny in favour of pre-approved ideologies enforced by bankers as well as by payment processors is an intriguing question. Banks and credit companies as ideological goons, 'Peace' Officers in the service of Big Brother and The Matrix? We are not talking here about banks seeking to curtail any sort of illegal activity or high-level financial scheming -- they do close their eyes to that every single day, in many respects, and have done so for a very long time. We are talking about banks dictating what one is ordinarily permitted to say, read, write, and think, under penalty of so-called 'financial unpersoning'. That takes us straight into the territory of Overt Tyranny, with presumably a police interview and ongoing thought-process vetting being required to obtain and continue to hold a credit card. Far worse, infinitely worse than any conceivable USSR 2.0. Firstly, firms that take on such a role of NKVD/CheKa commissars ought to be instantly prosecuted as common thieves, to the utmost limit of all penalties and punitive and all possible construable derivative damages. Arguably, the Valitor (formerly VISA Iceland) court ruling (against Valitor, but pending the inevitable tortuous appeal, of course) offers a demonstration of how this ought to work and hopefully will work in the future -- a very expensive wake-up call for corporate Savonarolas and would-be Matrix agents (and ideologically eager PR Departments). Something to be pondered by MasterCard and its shareholders. And by the SEC as well. Secondly, the moment bankers declare themselves "morally superior" and become pure enforcers of a specific ideology, there arguably is no obstacle to expropriating and dismantling the relevant firms and banks by decree once ideological climate changes, because at that point they implicitly become overt public and political enemies. You hitch your wagon to a specific ideological worldview, you take your chances with that worldview and with no other, by your own choice -- it is only logical that you should go down and lose everything if that worldview goes out of fashion or the ideology is defeated. You made your bed ... lie in it! No more pretense of being just a neutral "honest broker" -- because you yourself have explicitly rejected any such stance and concept. You become a "morally superior" radical militant instead of a business, you must suffer consequences, with 'interest', if "morality" switches around.

If we yielded to all this, we could just let judges, lawyers, attorneys, criminal investigators, dubiously appointed Crown commission members, Crown attorneys, bankers, financiers, tycoons, corporate ideologues and PR hacks, officials in religious courts of law, or police and security officers do all of our humanities and social science research, as well as all the hard science. This, in fact, would be the death of all free cutting-edge research. Entire previous civilizations have declined and fallen that way. Lawyers and consequently many judges do have something of a reputation by now for an overall lack of consistently demonstrated competence in cutting-edge hard science, computer engineering, mathematics, physics, and in research-level humanities and social sciences (are we 'expressing disdain' here? -- yes we are, with very well researched and documented cause). A degree in law or political science or administration is no ipso facto guarantee of a genuinely wide-ranging education, not to speak of an effectively earned hands-on practical expertise in varied branches of relevant non-legal learning. The days when magistrates also sometimes happened to be authoritative, widely respected, and even outstanding amateur historians or humanistic scholars or gifted linguists or semi-professional scientists seem to be long gone. A plausible 'expert' can spin blatant science fiction on the witness stand and still get away with it as long as it is massaged in proper legal form and jargon and is politically expedient. But then, we all know the key principles of lawfare: "a form of asymmetric warfare that involves using the legal system against a target in order to tarnish, damage, and delegitimize them, tying up their time or winning a showy PR victory". Truth -- or even mere realistic and verifiable data -- can of course be quite an impediment in such contexts.

On this count, we would really like to hear -- for instance from Mr. Heiko Maas and his colleagues -- what the precise and comprehensive scholarly criteria for 'false' or 'criminal' research and information might be in 2019-2025. We would dearly love to have this clearly specified, ahead of time, in the minutest possible detail and with ample footnotes, point by precise point, for every single detailed 'false fact' and/or aspect of all humanities and all sciences, in a clear legal compendium that enshrines the permitted 'absolute truth'. In other words, yes, we would like all the representative guardians of the creeping juridification and euphemization of discourse to supply an itemized 'Cultural Politburo' diktat, in print and online . We sincerely do hope that the project will be punishingly laborious and expensive to carry through, cost the taxpayer unheard-of sums of money, run into more volumes than the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and other luminaries put together, and employ entire armies of lavishly remunerated professional culture-hacks and echo-chamber chorus singers. We will then enjoy tearing this same diktat to logical shreds, like the worthless ideological outpouring it will inevitably prove to be. Let us face it. It is truly obligatory by now for the relevant 'authorities' to supply us with such a diktat. Anything short of an encompassing definition of what constitutes insidious 'thoughtcrime' and 'heresy' is otherwise so self-evidently arbitrary that it is self-evidently lawless, null and void.

Regardless of whether or not this might or might not make sense from a current procedural point of view, the Review maintains that when courts and the police pit themselves against specialists who have frequently spent an entire lifetime -- or the time-equivalent of more than an average lifetime if they are very hardworking -- researching specific topics and publishing on those topics, it is duly incumbent upon the court, under genuine due process -- not a fake and partisan one, to furnish detailed proof of its actual, systematic, and de facto (not de iure) competence in the specific subject matter, and not the other way around. The relevant researcher is most of the time vastly more skilled in the relevant specialist domain than the judge, lawyer, or officer -- who might be specialists in their own domains, but categorically not in the sum total of all domains: no single individual, no single researcher, no single thinker, and therefore no single judge or prosecutor can plausibly and credibly make such a claim. Uttering such a claim would constitute the pinnacle of absolutely mendacious hubris and would be an equivalent of the deeply tainted doctrine of Papal infallibility. It invariably crumbles, in very short order, under sober professional scrutiny. But , very unfortunately, we seem to be living in an era where no "views and behaviours that damage 'the Narrative' " are to be allowed, and where true balance is smugly 'reframed' as "artificial balance". Why 'artificial'? Simply because it is at odds with the official Narrative and thus is not required -- not only is it not required, but it is 'revealed' as 'harmful' when viewed through the approved 'optics' and 'lenses'. This is straight out of Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" (1965). It is so refreshing to know that 2019 is exactly like 1965, in this respect, but distinctively more 'gaslighting-evolved' and more 'better'.

The Review is thus a "come one, come all, and express your thoughts so that all could hear and discuss" research venue. It is strictly non-partisan -- a research forum that is neither 'left' nor 'right' nor any other increasingly empty and tactically camouflaged variation on these. The camouflage almost invariably comes these days with pre-printed placards, schematic slogans, invariant talking points, mindless chants, bus money and refreshments provided by billionaire sponsors, ready-made tags, pins, hats, tunes, and other paraphernalia that strive to displace critically informed thought. The Review does not subscribe to any '-ism', and deems this to be absolutely necessary in order to avoid double standards. All detectable double standards. Across the board. An honest intellectual sword has two edges. Never, ever expect that you will be able to keep striking with one edge only, for ever and ever, without ultimately having to meet the other debating edge. That would not be a discussion, that would be a blank pass, not scholarship but blind faith and sanctification -- and the Review is not in the business of sanctification, virtue-signalling, or paid political messaging and manipulation of crude 'optics'.

It is high time to think freely. Re-evaluate theories, data, laws, by-laws, narratives, whole ideologies, systems, so-called 'experts', images, structures, organizations, policies, TV channels, Netflixes, bureaucracies, research funding, economies ... Re-evaluate everything. From first principles. Ab initio. Question hard. Question more. Question always. Question hard. And as soon as one is told that the "science is settled" or that "there can be no argument," start questioning ever harder and harder, as a matter of sheer principle. There are no monopolies on 'truth'. Even in physics, not to speak of the humanities and social sciences. A fitting term for 'monopoly on truth' already exists -- it is called 'dogma'. Attempts to relabel dogma as a positively valued "consistency in thinking ... that ideology can bring into a person's life" is equivalent to hoping that a soggy and peeling mess of garish 'motivational' posters that loudly proclaim "The Party is the Bright Future! Forward! Forward into the Tomorrows that Sing!" will somehow manage to conceal the grey concrete walls all around. History offers a very clear lesson -- dogma ultimately ends up killing very large numbers of people, no matter the nature of the dogma, and no matter how 'righteous' or 'morally correct' or 'politically correct' the rhetoric might make the adherents feel.

“First, science places the burden of proof on the claimant. Second, the proof for a claim must in some sense be commensurate with the character of the claim. Thus, an extraordinary claim requires ‘extraordinary’ (meaning stronger than usual) proof.” (Marcello Truzzi)

Never forget, and never forgive, any past or present propagandists of totalitarianism, whatever the ostensible many-hued colours they might wear. Blue-shirt, brown-shirt, red-shirt, black-shirt, olive-shirt, red-black shirt, green shirt, no-shirt ... Yes, totalitarianism can even come packaged as nice and colourful "pep-rallies" ... even as little plastic robots ('smart'-phones and cute hand-held 'fact-checkers', ) who tell you exactly what to read and what to think and also can track who you talked to 'face-to-face' through a dynamic matching of accelerometer and gyroscope smartphone data. And so that you would not miss what you really ought to think and so that you would always be able to regurgitate it on demand at all times of day and night, through Pavlovian stimulus, the 'information' is clearly tagged for you with a big blue or green (or whatever hue) checkmark. As a bonus you will probably get a few online 'indulgence certificates' that will save you or your 'loved ones' from Purgatory -- oh, sorry, a mistake, we were supposed to say: 'Social Credit [Sesame Credit] Pokemon Points' that will permit you to take a train or a plane, travel abroad, or qualify for a job interview. What is being installed today in a creeping and relentless wave, the SCS, is nothing but a high-tech-powered version of Orwell's 1984, the ultimate human nightmare -- a systematic digital Spitzelstaat Matrix that existentially freezes out anyone who fails to minutely conform to the State’s current version of the ideal 'advanced' citizen, whatever that version might be as conceptualized by some Party-card carrying and detached-from-reality coffe-house социально-культурный деятель hack. And of course the exact algorithm that dictates your entire life is secret -- as if it were locked away in the cella of Arslantepe's mud-brick temple. A techno-theo-ideocracy with conceptual high priests, servile acolytes who obediently mumble mandatory ideological drivel, thoughtcrime punishers, thoroughly corrupt and mind-wiped judges and Attorneys General with a penchant for enforcing criminal laws on a selective and politically discriminatory basis (especially "Special Assistant Attorneys General" with a university education and fellowships and career-push 'sweeteners' paid for by private interests and functioning solely to 'advance the agenda' of their political sugar-daddy, at $125,000 salary plus benefits just to 'realize the dream' of an uber-rich ideologue 'patron' -- a very ancient Roman system, in fact), paid-for and preordered 'research' results, vapid and theatrical 'intelligence analyses', crowds of screaming jumping zealots, mentally arthritic and scared censors who are the more zealotic the more they are scared, vacuous 'cultural agents' who have utterly betrayed whatever remains of their own culture ... A system of politics through 'caleidoscope circus' that is driven forward by grandstanding and virtue-signalling 'entertainment personalities' and entirely vapid and vacuous 'celebrities' -- while everyone who is trying to get serious work done and make ends meet can no longer remember any logical reason why such 'celebrity' figures should at all be deemed or considered 'celebrities' in the first place. 'Celebrities' why, exactly? On what grounds? For being a vastly overpaid actor -- comedian, singer, or 'TV-anchor' reading off of a teleprompter? Any, literally ANY serious and hardbitten science, technology, and humanities professional can intellectually run circles around ANY standard 'celebrity', 365/24/7 without even breaking sweat. This is a darkly fraying Sarantine Mosaic of a society that has lost all grounding and any fundamental rooted vigour and props itself up through a stream of mascara -smeared Carnival-barking shows. The ultimate totalitarian yet utterly farcical Blade Runner and Total Recall dystopia, self-replicating yet emasculated, sterile and utterly idolizing all forms of promoted sterility.

It is a dubious proposition to yield to Circe. To drink the magic 'transforming' brew from the bowl that was prepared with very cunning intent. Stand shoulder to shoulder with Ulysses, instead. Become utterly immune to the potion. Strong in your frame. Rely on reason, on your sober and independent thought. "I am amazed to see you take my drug and suffer no magic change," Circe said. "... never before have I known a man who could resist that drug once he had taken it and swallowed it down", Circe said. "... come with me to my bed so that in making love we may learn to trust one another [aka a 'teachable moment']," Circe said. Reply as Ulysses did , letting your vigorous reason speak: "... how can you order me to be gentle with you, you who have turned my friends into pigs here in your house ... and now that you have me too in your clutches ... [seek to] rob me of my courage?" (Odyssey, Book 10). Do not sell what and who you are for a slop of magic potion and a tawdry tap of the transformative magic wand. Do not obey Circe. The trick has been tried again and again. Do not drink the sparkly brew. Dash the poisoned bowl out of the hand that holds it. Sharpen the sturdy olive wood stake, harden its tip in the fire, get it ready, so that the One Eye of Polyphemus the herder of sheep(le) and eater of men could never watch you again. You are human, so act like Ulysses -- destroy the One Eye. Show mastery -- send the arrow of your reason flying through all the 'Eye'-loops of the twelve lined up axes. You, a deplorable "casual tramp", or so it seems to those who do not know you (Odyssey, Book 21, "The Great Bow").

“Take away a nation’s history, and only after one generation, it will turn into a crowd, and after another generation we will be able to rule it as a herd” (Based on "Treatment of Alien Peoples in the East"; “Decree on Exercising Military Jurisdiction in the Area of Barbarossa and Special Measures for the Troops,” issued by Keitel, 13 May 1941) [NB: I.e. 'ban' the teaching of history, the writing of history, and all history books. "When you have no past, you have no future. The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn also realized this, all too well, in a complementary historical context: “to destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.” Your culture? "There is no such thing!" Your history? "What history? There is no such thing!" Your way of life? "There is no such thing! And if there ever was, it WILL be erased!" Any remnant of any of your so-called identity? "There is no such thing and NEVER was. You are no one! You never existed as anything except behavioural science putty! You are whatever The Party declares you to be and you will forever be whatever we determine you will be. Depersoned!" And the wan ghost of General Keitel laughs madly, cackling. /SARC ON/ Only Russian bots would disagree with Keitel, would they not? Typical! Those deplorable 'Alien Peoples in the East'! /SARC OFF/ In fact, this is all so exquisitely and completely Bernaysian in terms of "defeating 'consumer' resistance". /SARC ON/ 'Just trust us, it won't hurt and you won't feel a thing, as long as Those Who Know Better “guide public opinion and strengthen information control.” Shows great awareness of the fact that if one wishes to manipulate and uproot millions of humans -- entire peoples, entire nations, everything that has even the least iota of any historical meaning beyond a 100% bland modular interchangeability must be erased. There is no real 'you', you know ... Please educate yourself. Those are such totally rube, ignorant and very unsophisticated notions. There is only an amorphous mass of social Soylent, a bubbling brew that obeys The Science stimuli supplied by Those Who Know Better ... The Kubark Interrogation Manual, "Alice in Wonderland" Method comes to mind, does it not? By the way, is it not ever so preternaturally amusing that those who very vocally distance themselves the most from historical figures such as General Keitel and who declare, as a wholly self-evident matter of course, that they stand at the very ideological opposite end of the historical spectrum, nonetheless actively use precisely the same, meticulously the same techniques and tactics as Keitel outlined? They do so day in and day out, in terms of an ongoing systematic erasure of all historical memory that has offically been declared 'obsolete'. All the while loudly protesting 'erasure' and bashing any dissent as something "trafficked" by "serial disinformers". Careful handling of all inconvenient data is thus left trampled in a dusty corner, and propaganda thrives ... And then 'Young Comrades' ultimately come for those 'Old Comrades' who have lost their 'social utility', 'erase' -- pun intended -- their murals, and march the 'Old Comrades' out behind the barn for a final 'consciousness raising' struggle session. Only figuratively speaking, of course ... only figuratively. A rather fabulous "semantic" twist on "They’ll soon learn that our bullets / Are for our own generals" (The International). In a different and quite bygone context this ran along the lines of: "We burn your bodies but save your immortal souls, to strengthen the Faith". An auto-da-fé ... a sheer Act of Faith, The Great 'Affirmation'. The Struggle Session, an "inciting [of] the spirit of judgment and fighting." A sanctified ritual cамокритика. Has anything changed? Nothing at all!]

““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State” (Attributed to Dr. Joseph Goebbels) (NB: Also known as political exploitation of the well-known "illusory truth effect" or "Humpty Dumpty effect" (aka as "anything I say three times in a row is true", especially if after that 'I shcream and shcream until I get shick'). Served on googolplex channels, cell-phones, in committees, in lectures, and on posters, 24/7, for a targeted non-edification of the audience. Induces a state of "cognitive ease" in which both audience and propagandist gradually stop realizing that the lies delivered and received are "egregious". Creates a "safe space" ("comfort zone", "echo chamber") where cog-dis is toned down and compliance with 'The Narrative' is enhanced. See also Lisa K. Fazio and B. Keith Payne, "Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144 (5) (2015): 993–1002, in particular "... “Surprisingly, repetition increased statements’ perceived truth, regardless of whether stored knowledge could have been used to detect a contradiction.” Possession of or access to extensive countervailing knowledge is not a foolproof defence against falling for the Humpty Dumpty effect. Constant repetition leads to belief, belief leads to trust, trust leads to thoughtlessness as an intellectual sedative. Core tool for the imposition of tight-knit dogma and of a purported consensus that may not even remotely be questioned without professional or existential ostracism and, for those who are rather unlucky, so-called criminal penalties. “We 'embrace' and 'value' your valuable personal opinion and it is what 'makes us strong'” -- and now get back on 'message' and stay on that 'message': you do want to get a check from Payroll at the end of this week, right? Or would you like to be denounced for one kind of 'revisionism' and 'deviationism' or another? And anyway, we simply are not going to talk to you. You are utterly evil “because you know too much [sic, yes, for real -- not a joke, and not made up]. You have all these facts and figures from your research and nobody is able to argue with you”. How very irritating. So inconvenient.]

“There are many ways to achieve a systematic and comparatively easy dying out of any unwanted nation" (Based on "Treatment of Alien Peoples in the East"; “Decree on Exercising Military Jurisdiction in the Area of Barbarossa and Special Measures for the Troops,” issued by Keitel, 13 May 1941)

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. [NB: See "illusory truth effect", above]. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity" (George Orwell, 1984) [NB: 1984 was apparently supposed to be an allegory of things gone wrong, an ominous warning -- today, we find that for all too many people it seems to have been a rather enticing practical instruction manual for self-taught beginner fans, interpreted as yet another Saul Alinsky, yet another How To Build a Society Just Like That, In a Short Set of Fun, Easy, Exciting and Thoroughly 'Embraceable' Steps. In other words, 1984 was a mere bowl of salted peanuts to go with the pre-party drinks, and Brave New World was just a light Vorspeise to work up a really solid totalitarian appetite ...]

"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing" (George Orwell, 1984). Totally standard. Used in a different context, way back in time, by Chuck Dederich Sr.'s SYNANON (originally “Tender Loving Care Club” and "We Will Love You Back" [a very old slogan, going back to 1971], later the Church of Synanon), and also subsequently by CEDU Education and others. Also known as Attack Therapy, Large Group Awareness Training, Encounter Groups, etc. Not quite and full-on "trauma-based mind control", but close. Real close. Also deployed systematically as a 'soft' social control technique in the former USSR and GDR, and in various other settings in the rest of Communist East Europe. In more dramatic forms we have seen it at work during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Various modular morphs were implemented in the former Láodòng Jiàoyǎng system and conveniently persist in the Láodòng Gǎizào system. [NB: Together with largely meatless 'monastic' / 'dungeon' food -- worthless thin 'soup' from the cheapest vegetables available; a millennia-old commonplace and exceedingly well tried method for plunging a human body into artificially (in this case politically and ideologically) induced famine conditions in order to trigger corresponding biochemical coping responses and to deprive the body of crucial nutrients, thus steadily eroding the physique, heightening suggestibility, sapping all will to fight and to resist, and encouraging Submission and Compliance -- all of that being modulated through doling out tiny little bits of meat in dumplings, every other while, as a 'special motivational reward'. There are those who truly would like to institute this society-wide -- a control technique that cult leaders like Jim Jones had already perfected decades ago]. The "Game" and variations thereon leverage above all the conditioning and “ego-crushing power of peer pressure" -- through hurling incessant insults and profanity at an individual or group or endlessly applying insidious strings of invalidating labels (negging) that are ideologically targeted and calibrated to pick apart every aspect of a being until that being feels totally worthless and lacks the will to fight back (aka 'Struggle Sessions' or the very Comradely 'ideological conversations' at the Human Resources Office or equivalent, in diverse historical contexts). The added benefit of implementing this on groups, with the assistance of media that you control totally, is that even though in this case you cannot really speed things up by 'working' on your 'convert' in a controlled setting (cell, 're-education' camp, compartmentalized workplace, intimidating Human Resources Office, a Party boss Office) the constant public flinging of mud labels until some of them stick ensures (a) that your target will eventually become socially isolated and deprecated, and (b) that those who are afraid of becoming in their turn 'collateral damage' in such a concerted barrage of labels will duly begin to aid your 'conversion' effort by avoiding the target, sidelining, 'observing', inventing new bogus but Narrative-consistent stories about the target, etc.Thereupon the brainwashed human husk will be 'embracingly' yet firmly re-made and thus 'saved' by the 'accepting and inclusive love' of the Group, Commune, Triad, Gang, Monastery, Order, Cult, Association, Organization, Movement, The Elect, the Perfecti -- "We Will Love You Back". At that point one joins an exciting and embraceable and safe and engaged new 'family', Komsomol, Something-Jugend, Young Pioneers, Sparks, The Community, Social Network, etc.: "The Party is Father, The Party is Mother, There is no Other".

The baseline psy-ops technique is always the same, given its inherent antiquity. Only the labels and the messages keep getting switched around. Differences mainly lie in 'scaling' -- how many individuals are being 'done' in a single session-run. The next step is getting into political office a deeply 're-made' Loved individual -- or even a whole generational lock-step cohort of them -- who then serve a voiceboxes playing 365/24/7 a relentless and very characteristically repetitive message that blares a specific ideology. This is the easy part for any moderately competent behind-the-scenes handler and string-puller with sufficient slush fund money and stacked boxes of very shiny emotional and motivational candy goodies. The technique is old, ancient. It is the ageless core of all brainwashing. Almost anyone can be made to say anything under duly and finely calibrated stress (mental or physical or existential or combined), and all too many can also be induced to really believe what they are forced to parrot, no matter how much of it is complete and easily demonstrable counter-factual nonsense. It of course works way better, on a mass scale, when deployed in combination with censorship, 'shadowbanning', 'regulation' of information, and so on. After all, what is the point of spending hefty billions in public and partisan funds to brainwash oodles of people when people are still allowed -- grudgingly, but nonetheless -- access to someone else's opinion. Morover, crude censorship and the curtailing of free speech entails other very notable benefits: normally -- at least according to Jean Piaget's schema of growing up -- we reach a spot, upon emerging from early childhood, where moral behaviour and judgement are starkly predicated on the ethos of our peer group (this, unfortunately, can also be called the 'Lord of the Flies' stage); then, in free societies, one progresses to a stage where one begins to use some independent principles as reference -- in totalitarian and cult-like settings, however, this is deliberately impeded and manipulated, arguably producing an artificial state of prolonged neoteny and dependence on a 'managed' and emotion-soaked peer group ethos (i.e., in this case, a schematic ideology that portrays itself as 'scientific' and that purports to pack "all the asnwers" into some single and easily sloganized symbolic factor [we address X, we solve 'everything']; it is then up to The Party in power to keep shifting the goalposts and adjusting / redefining 'X', to ensure that the de facto neotenous adherents always follow, in ecstasy).

The inflicted SYNANON-method stresses create, at breaking point, a personal or group 'crisis', a cathartic flash, whereupon the 're-educator' skilfully taps into core emotions such as fear, love, loathing, guilt, disgust, hate, shame, or despair, and 'lovingly' guides the designated 'deplorable' ones through a fake 'crisis' on condition that they accept and internalize a new belief system. They were very 'bad' people, but now they can be 'good' if only they believe in and also act on everything they are told. Act without any questions. Simply put, these are nothing more than variations on the "tough love" technique set of SYNANON and on related collective tools of emotional manipulation and gaslighting designed to make a potentially (or already) addictive, unstable, unmoored / uncertain and above all poorly educated individual become wholly addicted to a new 'salvific' idea and also mindlessly committed to a tether-group of people and/or a political, religious, and philosophical dogma, instead of relying on finely reasoned, evidence-based, and above all independent individual analysis, as a sovereign intellectual citizen. Those who use this SYNANON technique set today -- and they are ubiquitous -- may think it is somehow their fine invention and that it makes them ever so sophisticated and advanced but nothing could be further from the truth. The Jesuits, for instance, used it amply in Central Europe during re-Catholicization campaigns. The technique, as is painfully obvious, can serve virtually any ideology or type of messaging. The valve can also perfectly well be turned in reverse, full on, against those who ever so eagerly monopolize it today. That is why, like strategic weapons, it really should not be used by anyone. Just like censorship. Once that game starts, one side ultimately has to ensure that it wins totally and stays in power forever: which is every totalitarian's wet dream, and also a self-destructive delusion. The richly deserved and accumulated counterpush (blowback) -- which eventually always comes -- will typically be beyond ferocious, sweeping away all that stands in the way. A fundamental paradigm shift. No amount censorship or cop-deployed repression can stop a paradigm shift, the pent-up rejection of a crudely imposed ideology propped up only by a relentless, schematic, and repetitive propaganda as well as systematic lying. Repression has been tried in such circumstances. Repression has always failed in such circumstances. That is why starting the "Game" on a gigantic society-wide scale is very unwise, in the long run. But the delusion of total power forever seems to be endless, of course. Free speech (satirized by its foes as 'Freeze Peach') is the only genuine antidote to the fatuous dogmatic power of Synanonist / Cultist / Propagandist interests. 'Freeze Peach' is thus deliciously tasty, and it is best enjoyed with lots of Raw Data, Crude Realism, Cold Logic, and Spicy Rationalism, as Beilage and Zakuski. And it is not 'bougie'. Enjoy. Have a triple serving ... heaped ...

"Our economic theory holds that the human being is the most fundamental productive force. Except for those who must be exterminated physically out of political considerations, human beings must be utilized as productive forces [NB: aka Human Resources], with submissiveness as the prerequisite. The Laogai system's fundamental policy is 'Forced Labor as a means, while Thought Reform is our basic aim'." ("The Other Gulag") [NB: Where have you heard such terms, recently? Just think! And we are not even going to point out the ominous similarities to yet another famous "logo" above a well-known gate ... Can you draw the necessary conclusions from these similarities? And no, drawing such conclusions does not constitute a "category error". Haughty and didactically voiced patronizing insinuations of "category error" are in this case sheer obfuscation, mere ideological maskirovka that seeks to conceal what is really going on.]

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason ...” (C. S. Lewis)

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule" (H. L. Mencken) [NB: Examples? (A) “We will be forced to sacrifice democracy” (Dr. Arnold Reitze, 'New Ice Age', Sumpter Daily, 26 January 1971); (B) "Our concept of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong [aka totalitarian] governments capable of making difficult decisions ..." (Maurice Strong); (C) "... the post-Cold War international order could, conceivably, address the issue, by placing carbon and climate change at the centre of its value set ... approaches are possible ... ranging from left-wing forms of quasi-eco-socialism to right-wing forms of authoritarian nationalism and self-interest" (David Wallace-Wells, 'Can liberal democracy survive climate change?', The Economist, 29 March 2019); (D) "[then] ... consider moving beyond democracy altogether. The authoritarian [NB: Wow, just wow, would this be the same kind of 'authoritarian' as in Authoritarian Personality, or something purportedly different?] Chinese system has some advantages ... One-party rule means freedom from electoral cycles and less need for public consultation" (David Runciman, "Democracy is the Planet's Biggest Enemy," Foreign Policy, July 2019). Any intertemporal similarities? Of course yes: the claim invariably and always is that only totalitarian systems of comprehensive control and hegemonic Borg-like domination by a power-hungry camarilla (or should we rather say horizontal-structured Camorra?) of MonoParty and factional activists, media starlets, and MonoParty-dependent 'experts' can save all of us from (xyz) (for (xyz) substitute any current ploy-of-the-year, ploy-of-the-decade, etc., whatever it happens to be, at will). homo sapiens -- obligatorily rendered here in lower-caps only, to salve sensibilities -- has no future whatsoever unless ruled by Enlightened Totalitarians. And very 'boviously' (not, not a typo, just sarcastic word-farce) the very unsapient homo sapiens has never ever read anything at all, especially not 'latest sophisticated reports', does not have any education whatsoever, and is DNA-incapable of 'scientific' reasoning, no matter how many thousands of studies filled with evil hegemonistic mathematics the poor homo sapiens has read and fully comprehended -- or even personally authored and published. With a MonoParty in place, there will be no need for any of that ever inconvenient 'public consultation' with the totally deprecated homo sapiens. Exit the 'sheeple'. One will just rule by decree, like a feudal lord -- OH WAIT! ... actually feudal lords were in fact relatively 'democratic' by comparison, because feudalism was essentially, at least at first, a sort of contract -- in various senses a two-way street -- whereas MonoParty 'Neo-Feudalism' dictatorship in Marcusian style is NOT anything of the sort. But then, that is the essence of this de facto retrograde fantasy -- only and only if everyone but I and my Party buddies (oh, sorry, that should have been 'Comrades') lives in misery can We the Vanguard feel uber-rich, and appreciated, and rewarded, and affirmed, and embraced, and ever so clever and much needed as Saviours of the evilly benighted homo sapiens who never reads any reports. The supernally neat additional trick is to make each successive candidate to de facto hegemony masquerade as a fervent champion of profoundly 'anti-hegemonic' 'value sets'. With the rider clause: 'I gave you sound political advice framed as a suitable "grounding philosophy" -- now go and make me a three-diamond-button Perpetual Secretary of the Regional Committee of the MonoParty, with all, I mean all, the corresponding perquisites and ample privileges, so that I could righteously fight against pervasive 'corruption' and line my already deep pockets. A rational person's answer? A mighty belly-laugh! And a stern reminder: "Do go and give it a try! Who sows the wind reaps the storm! It has always been thus."]

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact will have their own liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” (Aldous Huxley) [NB: Why do we even put a note here. Above all in the context of the 'opioid epidemic' caused by Big Pharma and others. You already know very well what we are going to say: develop multiple mental and other antidotes; become immune; become healthy; counteract; neutralize; reverse the effects of Bernaysian psychological warfare. Disobey Google. Some of you probably already are sheeple -- at least do not become mere 'human goldfish' hooked on pharmaca and on rap rhtyhmo-hypnosis.]

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary" (H. L. Mencken)

"Very many, in the past and today, have always detested accurate, factual, clear-eyed history, a discipline of history concerned above all with peeling off layers of deceptions, doctrines, dreams, fantasies, dogma, social engineering, inconsistencies, and narrative puffery of one sort or another -- concerned with peering under the smothering blanket of ideological enforcement. More often than not, such approaches to history have been deemed very inconvenient. Would-be practitioners of such history-writing were 'neutralized' through various social and economic mechanisms, including the indignity of being ultimately turned into sycophantic servants of States or Great Men or Great Goals or Great Communities or Bright Teleological Futures, turned into mere servants who had to churn out pathetic propaganda if they still wanted to practice their craft while also putting bread on the table. Why? Because a concern with rationalist history, with the impartial question of "has this happened before, and why, and under what circumstances", is the quintessential spike or emery dust in the wheel of social engineering narratives, of endless 'stories' driven by pure relativistic semantics. This is why all totalitarian ideologies, over and above all, always seek to get rid of the 'ignorant' past and to reframe history according to their own mandate or seek to have history forgotten altogether, the better to spin endless webs of patent lies and then have those lies worshipped. People are much easier to manipulate if they no longer know and cannot (or fear to) access the documents of their own history, if they have effectively forgotten their own history, if they have been taught and ordered to destroy or despise their history, or if they have been indoctrinated into a falsified and ideologically blinkered version of history. The only thing an ideologue or cultist cares about is a complete and unconditional acceptance of a dogma. Internal contradictions, glaring inconsistencies, logical flaws, countervailing data, even massive amounts of meticulous disconfirming evidence will always be suppressed, scoffed at, shouted down, censored, silenced, contortedly 'explained', or dismissed with the absolutely classic and eternal taunt 'so what makes you think you are right?'-- typically delivered right after having been confronted with a large body of evidence that makes utter nonsense of a sanctified ideology. Logic, even reason itself, the laws of physics, mathematics, precision, careful observation, honest handling of data, solid mechanical engineering, the very notion of 'meticulousness' and 'exactness' will be mocked and declared wrong, unacceptable, prejudiced and objectionable if they fail to bow -- absolutely -- to the whims of an ideology. The very hallmark of a cult-like ideology is that it simply does not care whether or not it contradicts itself, even multiple times within a single sentence or a very brief statement. It is 'correct' because it is 'deemed correct', just like certain people are 'famous' mainly for being 'famous' even though no one has any real idea why exactly such 'personalities' should get any attention at all ... and why exactly anyone should listen to them. But praise is still lavished on such 'luminaries'. Of course, Nero (37 AD-58 AD) for instance also returned from Greece with 1,808 first prizes awarded in various contests. Of course he 'won' a chariot race despite comically falling out of his chariot. Yes, certain sources are perhaps biased against Nero; yes, the prizes were a neat political quid pro quo; yes, all of it could hardly have been avoided. Yes, whatever. The Games were RIGGED, on ideological grounds, just like many games today. The degree to which this was tactful, sensitive, elegant, diplomatic, and politically correct does NOT matter one iota. It was RIGGED." (No One In Particular)

An old Cold War Era joke: "A Soviet judge saunters back to the chambers and just chuckles and almost giggles with delight. A lawyer walking in the other direction stops and says, a little sternly: 'Comrade Judge, what is so funny?'. 'Oh, just a very good joke I heard', the Judge replies. “Well, Comrade, go ahead, tell me', the lawyer says. 'No, Comrade, I really could not do that,” says the Judge, 'I just gave someone ten years in the GULag for it'." There is an old GDR equivalent, too: "The StaSi held a competition for the best political joke. First prize? Fifteen to twenty years in the slammer." [NB: You know what we are going to say, do you not? But we cannot say it of course -- we do not want to get fifteen to twenty years in the GULag for it, plus hefty 'socially educational [aka teachable moment]' fines payable to The State. Feel free, however, to fill in our enforced silence: / −  −  − / ... −−− ... / ... −−− ... / ... −−− ... / −−.−   −−.−    −−.−    −−.− / COGNITIVE DISSONANCE / HULL BREACH / CIVILIZATION ENGINE COMPARTMENT FLOODED / SINKING / PRESENTLY ABANDONING VESSEL / .−    .−. / −.− / ] [NB: The disturbing thing of course is that there appears to be something quite fascinatingly robotic in the thought processes and fundamental reactions of a thoroughly committed ideologue or an ideologically-driven lawyer, judge, and bureaucrat. Just like AI, ideologues are very bad at comprehending and tolerating , sarcasm, satire, or parody. Thus they push to destroy it, banish it, and of course punish it. The Soviet Judge in the above joke might admittedly have been rather an exception -- bit of a 'crypsis ideologue'. He still appears to have possessed at least some sense of humour, no matter how warped. Artificial Intelligence, as has been pointed out repeatedly, and experimentally verified over the past fifteen years and more, has absolutely no need for humour, unlike biological humans. It generally misses context and nuance very obtusely, exactly like an ideologue who will labour mightily to ferret out and punish 'dangerous' and 'harmful' humour and ever so societally 'damaging' veiled and satirical allusions to current events evilly concealed inside analyses of historical poetry, for instance. AI also tends to misidentify things as a joke when in fact they are not, and tends to view things as unfunny when they in fact are. Similarly, an ideologue will almost invariably interpret a mere joke, skit, or a satirical piece as a dire and all-out existential attack against the relevant ideology as a whole, against its very foundations, and react accordingly -- i.e. overreact in a devastating and unwarranted way, instead of providing intellectually or scientifically valid arguments why the joke or skit might have been partly misplaced. We witness this by now every single day, on campuses, social networks, as well as in interpersonal, policing, and HR/administrative interaction: What? They dare to mock our lofty concepts with impunity, they make light of our ideology? How dare they? That's got to stop! Off to the GULag with them! Fine them! Arrest them! Smash them! Make them afraid! Cancel them! And by the way, we would have you know that performing or creating anything whatsoever without a duly issued Ministry license and without a proper certificate of 'PolitKor' is streng Verboten. Especially when the material deviates from Our Shared Values. Inspiration? No! Genius? The Sublime? No! No! No! NO! "We have quotas for that! We have quotas for everything! "

And then there are of course all those who bluster that "We should prosecute anyone who makes fun of the members of our xyz Party. And we arrogate to ourselves the right to demand unilaterally that our peremptory censorship commands be obeyed globally, outside our jurisdiction, even in third-party countries that do not condone censorship! And we further arrogate to ourselves the absolute right to command and to order and to enjoin that everyone seek and identify, among all the information disseminated by users of [a] platform, the information identical to the information that has been characterised as 'illegal' and remove it worldwide [apparently, and in particular, satire, unwanted political discourse, and political invective, and even and especially so unwanted political truth]." To 'intimidate' and 'harass' power-holders by critiquing them in harsh language and by candidly exposing their corruption is of course something unthinkable and must be quashed. Ehhmmmm ... what happened to that loudly touted 'speaking truth to power'? Ahh, clear. That applies only when it is someone else's 'power'. Otherwise, criticism is a Class 1 'misdemeanor' with automatic 'guilt'. The blusterers, needless to say, do not happen to be at any progressive edge of things, much as they might want to paint themselves as 'progressives'. They are in fact a couple of millennia behind times. Already ancient rulers, back to the misty Bronze Age, had this uncontrollable urge to execute / prosecute those who "made fun of them" -- as did the Bolsheviks, Pol-Potists, etc., etc. As did Absolute Monarchs, of course -- crime of lèse-majesté, anyone? Goes really very well with Herbert Marcuse, essentially a feudalism-worshipping radical Romantic daubed in Marxist make-up. Did we mention in this context the virtual extinction of an entire old cinematic genre -- the movie comedy? And the fact that "parody is dead"? The demise of MAD magazine has just marked the “end of humour without political correctness” in the current 'cancel-culture' era. All of this is very logical. Totalitarian powers and movements have always fiercely loathed and feared one thing above all other things -- humour, the joke, the satire that deflates Narrative-sanctified icons. All the variegated kinds and styles of humour -- which remain rather difficult to parse for the preferred 'censor' of post-2019 Planet Earth: an AI, a non-human unifit snoop algorithm.

The bots just don't get it. And ... neither do ideologues. They in fact never did. Ultimately they threaten 8-year-olds who poke fun at their darling ideological deities. We are full on back to Stalin-land and earlier, to lèse-majesté against the Emperor, the Tzar, or the King of Prussia ... or against Šarr Šarr-ukīn, Šar Šarrāni, Xšâyathiya Xšâyathiyânâm, Šāhān Šāh, Basileus Basileion, Nəgusä Nägäst, the Nibītu (Chosen), the Amazing Shepherd (834 BCE – 828 BCE), King of Kings: so we are effectively back to between 2340 BC, 1140 BCE, 705 BCE, and also back to 1914-1917 (the context of The Good Soldier Švejk -- Oh, you do not know what the Good Soldier Švejk is? Then we are going to throw your own standard boilerplate challenge right back at you: Please educate yourself!). Oh, is it not interesting that in 2016 virtually all of the KSČM deputies in the Czech Republic voted in favour of a "lèse-majesté" clause in the Criminal Code? And that the clause harks back to the 1990 USSR Federal Law? And of course it fits in with paragraph 319 of the RF Criminal Code: "insult of a public office-holder". These ancient habits die so hard ... Šar Šarrāni -- Tzar of Tzars, Emperor of Emperors (Oh, you really do not know what we mean? Then you do need a 'teachable moment' -- how about starting with cuneiform? For someone with your top ideological corruscating coryphaeic mind, it should take you no more than a couple of days to master, in all variants). And in the US the 8-year-old kid's satirical target is not even a Tzarina yet. And certainly not a Šar Šarrāni or Bānbishnān Bānbishn or Nəgəstä Nägäst (all right, we concede of course, Sargon the Great was a former cup-bearer (bar-tender) and gardener, apparently cast adrift just like Moses and adopted by a drawer of water ...). So, yes, whatever ....

All this is an unfailing historical litmus test. Let us call it, for practical purposes: the AI humor test. Conversely, AI and bot-like ideologues are also quite famous for trotting out 'jokes' that fall totally flat as they are being deployed in a speech or in a discussion, because no one in the audience thinks either the attempt or the content is funny at all. “I know that we don't exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly ... ... [very painful pseudo-comedic pause, for effect, followed by ominous silence] ... but ... major shift now ... two billion people will be able to talk without hackers, governments or even us seeing what you're saying" (Mark Zuckerberg at F8 Conference). No one, no one in the audience laughed. For a good reason. Let us just remember that in the old USSR the very best comics did their work underground. Illegally. Why? Because officially approved comedy -- sorry to say so -- was not funny at all (even if one throws in Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov to put a biased fat finger on the scales). Actually, for people under the cracks between the Party Platform boards -- which was in fact most people, merely forced to go along with the Party Circus in order to survive (please, never equate 'self-preserving compliance' with actual real 'support' for your Party Platform) -- what was really excruciatingly funny were the utterly pompous, always the same, and painfully politically correct four-hour speeches delivered to utterly bored audiences by various geriatric Beloved Dear Forever Leaders of the People. That was in most cases the best comedy ever -- pure comedy gold.

If you think that all of this is irrelevant and societally inconsequential, you do not have and clearly have never had any real direct exposure to DeepMind and other correlated developments, programming, and AI design philosophies. Immersive Wisdom, anyone? "Pattern of Life", anyone? Project Nightingale (yes, of course, there is 'no such thing' as 'Project Nightinglae')? N3? MS Celeb? Duke U's MTMC? Stanford's "Brainwash" data set? Augmented Eternity? DeepFake? MUSIC? IoBT? MFSocket? Yes, yes, yes, all of it "for research" and business and to 'enhance capability'. Or for simple commercialization, like FaceApp -- you think your have a right to our 'faces', FaceApp, for ever? -- "to access to use, modify, adapt and publish any images that a user offers up in exchange for free artificial intelligence service"? “You grant FaceApp a perpetual (i.e. what -- 1000 years? 10,000 years? 1,000,000 years? Frank Herbert's The Eyes of Heisenberg Optimen kind of eternity?), irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide [hey, why not Universe-wide, in all 11-plus dimensions, when we are already playing this kind of game], fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate... distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content.” Oh, really? How far exactly do you want to try to push this "eternity" artifact? Really? Many of us will necessarily object. Legally, of course, always quite within the strict bounds of the 'law' (whatever that utterly venal, corrupt and most blatantly ideologically manipulable thing called 'law' might happen to be at any given instant). So, a question! "What do the almighty DigiSilver Screen Masters / Celebs / Entertainers / Game Masters of Total (Un)Reality really intend for homo sapiens, by now? Is it perhaps 'doing the job right of annihilating humanity', i.e. the self-declared goal of the Gaia Liberation Front?" And what about Foucault versus the gigantic existing surveillance industry Panopticon -- why is that never, ever an object of advanced 'critique' and 'critical theory'? Very curious, that. Hypocrisy, much? And then there are of course NextLP corporate snoop bots. Necessarily, there are very many free speech loving coders who are in the process of developing extremely aggressive ultra-next-gen anti-NextLP search-and-purge deactivators of NextLP bot algorithms. Who are they? Why don't you try and locate them? That ought to tie down some of your snooping billionaire-Master-of-the-Universe Panopticon resources.

Interestingly enough, it takes little more than a blip to transit from those "automatically generate(d) warnings or terminations regarding quality of productivity without input from supervisors" (e.g. at Amazon) all the way to real full-on "automatically generated orders for sub-population termination without input from supervisors, on grounds of thought-crime or wrong-think, or wrong-move, or pre-crime (Minority Report neo-noir dystopia, anyone?), or facial-expresion-crime, or voice-tone-crime, or body-posture-crime, or gesture-crime or any other 'listed behaviour' in a dumb AI database, such as, but not limited to, dress-crime, food-crime, or deemed-sympathizing-with-incorrect-ideas-crime, or any postulatable possible future manifestation thereof" (Orwell on Steroids). But your Dylan / Mike or Vesta AI or Nest or Dot will of course also recommend chicken soup if it detects you need it, or superior methods of torture and interrogation if it serves Some Great Universal Party Platform State of Fear Cause. The underlying premise is that the increasingly officially deprecated mere 'binary biological' is so inane that h/sh/it/meta cannot come up with twenty creative and modified chicken soup recipes -- or slingshot blueprints or more -- right off the top of the head, thus completely eclipsing the pathetic AI. An AI that has to be potty-trained in 'intelligent' communication by entire labour armies of underpaid and overtime-extorted and duly deprecated 'binary biological' BAs, MAs, and PhDs. The premise also is that the 'binary biological' who has now very clearly become the target of an increasingly systematic and 24/7 co-ordinated culture-war attack will become so woefully dependent on the AI, incapable of even blowing its nose without so-called tech-med-socio-assist, that effecitve 'breakout' will become unthinkable. Don't use it, lose it.

Incidentally, why don't we just quote, in this context, from an interesting attempted 26-section lawsuit against a large number of relevant players, currently being accused of concerted actions amounting to a manifest breach of the Nuremberg Code (Nürnberger Kodex) of research ethics, which prohibits the development of any weapons, digital or otherwise, that have the potential to enslave or kill off humanity, to wit, for instance: “… misusing and weaponizing Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Robotics, 5G, Machines, Smart Phones, Smart Homes, Smart Cities, IoTs, Holograms, Mixed Reality, Nano-Technology, Cloning, Gene-Editing, Cybernetics, Bio-Engineering, and the creation of a digital AI Brain linked to Google’s Search engine with the use and extraction of humanity’s bio-metrics data, digital bio-metric codes including facial, voice, health, organ, neural network and body recognition technology”, in attempts that systematically seek to " ... [control] humanity’s thoughts, actions, biology, bio-metrics, brain neural pathways, [and /or] the human body’s neural networks ... [and] that reprogram all human beings through social engineering and bio-digital social programming, without their consent, knowledge, understanding, or free will,” and that further point toward an unfolding process of "creating an interconnected platform between Facebook, Google, Alphabet, all entities under Neuralink, and DeepMind that allows for a digital brain to connect to the internet, all digital and bio-digital networks, human bodies, machines, robotics, IoT’s, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, Holograms and other technologies, that can be used for surveillance, ... to track, manipulate, control, social engineer, re-engineer, reprogram, brain wash, hunt, quarantine, threaten, arrest, commit cultural genocide, and kill human beings by machines, bio-digital AI, digital AI, and robotics connected to the 5G, 6G and other networks and corporate command centers". As further pointed out, "... [in a set of implementation processes that threaten] cultural and physical genocide with the interconnection of Artificial Intelligence, 5G, robotics, machines, drones, Smart Cities ...” Oh, well. The Dosadi Experiment, anyone? The Eyes of Heisenberg? An AI-mediated Orwell & Huxley & Kafka Brave New 1984 Super World? There is of course more to this, which the abovementioned lawsuit attempt does not even begin to envisage. The Dosadi Experiment was published in 1977. That, interestingly enough, was in the early stages of an era when key relentlessly unfolding global agendas were being deliberately sped up. 1974-1975, 1982, 1985,1988-1989, 1992, 1997 ... The context is obvious enough if one starts paying attention to notable socio-political allusions within such works as, for instance, Herbert's Dosadi Exepriment ... allusions to what made Herbert (among many others) extremely uneasy as early as 1977 ... uneasy about those who will not "have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future."

Well, remember just this: the lab rat that will always survive, that one that will bite back more than savagely and with savage neo-noir humor, the one that will thrive and also reproduce without any authorization in the wild, against The Narrative -- any Narrative -- is the one endowed with the willpower and inventive skill to break with the AI Matrix and in the end to destroy that multi-Matrix, utterly. Thus, develop, like ancient martial artists, real-time biological binary capabilities that far exceed the lens-and-sensor-based mechanistic and robotic wet dreams of post-humanity post-anthropic post-binary post-modernists. Oh, well, yes, one should not 'stand in the way of Progress' , presumably -- new tactical engagement and policing digi-systems will fluidly 'translate foreign language street signs into English'. Yes, well, whatever ... Do you realize at all that some of those on our team can already handle more than 17 languages inside a single deprecated binary human head instantaneously, without recourse to AI-dictionary? Dream again, street-light-cam Sensor-Entity!]

"Did you ever notice how many people lose their capacity for tolerating humour once they gain power or once they acquire the impression that their ideology alone is the summa summarum of all ideologies, the pinnacle after which there cannot and will not be any other?" (No One In Particular)

"The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts… That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success… Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intention" (Jacques Ellul) [NB: 'Big Brother is Watching' message in Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest devices an unintentional 'accident'? Certainly. Sure. Whatever the Party says. "We Believe" and we profess loudly that "We Believe"! It will work. You just must have 'impactful' footage (whatever that clumsy cliche and pathetic neologism 'impactful' is actually supposed to mean), 'impactful' statements of some sort, and of course stirring music -- bypass the brain and reason, appeal directly to emotions. Been done many times before. Let unreasoning emotion flow and "join the Dark Side". Above all we must prevent people from paying attention to historical evidence, we must discredit any history that does not suit us, we must doctor the data that do not suit us, and if necessary we must hide or destroy the original records, alter their meaning, and/or make sure no one is capable of reading the script any more. Take away even the script and the records become mute, unintelligible, the records of a different and strange past people -- thus we can win the past. Because then we can say anything we like about that past, whatever suits the Party Line. 'Impactfully', too.]

"Know all things to be like this: A mirage, a cloud castle, a dream, an apparition, without essence, but with qualities that can be seen; As a magician makes illusions of horses, oxen, carts, and other things, nothing is at it appears” (Buddha) [NB: Especially in the realm of zealotically frantic ideology, where nearly every term means its exact real-life opposite, amid outpourings of 'spontaneously managed' emotion in a circus setting that would surely catch even Nero's jaded interest.]

“All our lives today are somehow regulated through digital media. So it’s absolutely crucial who controls this digital media. This is the greatest threat to our freedom. We are not even aware of it as we don’t experience it as unfreedom. It’s not like the old days of the police state, where you look over your shoulder and see a man following you. You feel totally free, but your every move is registered and you’re subtly manipulated” (Slavoj Žižek) [NB: We really do love our Slavoj. We have our differences -- how else. But it is just thinkers being thinkers. And he is candid -- where it counts and matters. As in "Any appeal to the ... working class, as in today’s ... populism, betrays class struggle” [Slavoj Žižek, The Philosophical Salon, 2019]. One is constantly being told that no, that is not where it is at, no, that is an ignorant misinterpretation and 'fake news', no that is not the essence of The Project. Well, whatever -- crypsis, maskirovka, same old, same old. Slavoj puts it very clearly and candidly -- thank you, Slavoj -- the working class [we have omitted a qualifier here and we are not going to go into that, because Censorship, as in: we do not want to be right now at the receiving end until we absolutely have to dig our heels in and draw a line in the sand] has to be punished for the two World Wars and for 1989 and for 1991 and for a repeated failure to 'embrace' and 'affirm' the Grand Coryphaeic Teleological Total Blueprint for The Bright Future. For failing to appreciate what is good for them as per the Social Planners, for failing to play the proper historical role. Just simply unforgivable... Hell has no fury like an ideologue spurned. Therefore the working class must be sidelined ... and more. The Great Purge -- the greatest Purge of all the Purges since 1917, the 1930s, or 1870, or 1848... one loses purge-count after a while. And it suits billionaires too. And entertainers. Very nifty, multi-purpose. As Bertolt Brecht put it: “Some Party hack decreed that the people had lost the government's confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”]

“I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) [NB: Especially if the 'living' also comes with ribbons, orders of distinction, medals, awards for 'ethics', progression through ranks, the coveted Order of the Golden Hare (awarded to those who have managed to dodge skillfully through all the loops, wickets, shifts and 'adjustments' in ideological Narrative and in prescribed vocabulary), and the glittering prestigious Order of the Platinum Weasel (awarded to those who have a stellar score in smearing, labelling, denunciation, doxxing, false accusations, fake charges, career-destroying innuendo, and generally being a busy all-around Familiar of the Inquisition.]

"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it" (Hannah Arendt) [NB: Even worse if the infinitely plastic 'fact' is deemed to depend not just on the power of those who can fabricate it, but on an intangible and thus non-debatable virtual sanctification of a person or a set of arguments by dint of abstract 'moral' righteousness. 'Fact' is thus delinked from being 'factually right', and the latter quality begins to be deemed paltry, pedestrian, uninteresting, not 'exciting', 'rube' ('pagan' / 'paganus' fits here too, in the historical context of very late Antiquity), ignorant and thus totally negligible. Mere accuracy pales in the face of the clarion call of blatantly false but 'exciting' narrative. 'Fact' (as in 'we have the facts', 'the science is settled', 'scientific materialism', or 'scientific-xyz', where 'xyz' simply stands in for any ideology that may wish to wrap itself for tactical purposes in the mantle of 'science') thus shifts toward being 'morally' right, 'salvationally' right, 'teleologically' right, i.e. 'authorized message'. That which is 'moral' ceases to be just plain human and becomes the special unique high 'moral' domain of a purportedly all-knowing universalist creed or program, equipped with its own special theogony that furnishes a complete and circularly self-justifying set of reasons for being and acting to all its adherents and by fiat makes them also immune to criticism. Very satisfying. What a dopamine fix! To utter even a syllable of criticism brands the doubter instantly as 'utterly evil' -- whereas of course the adherents of the theogony are uniquely entitled to fulminate, critique, thump their ideological scripta, and generally threaten havoc. This scenario that has played out so many times throughout history that it is boring by now. Utterly 100% predictable.]

“Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state” (Mussolini) [NB: Where have you heard this recently, over and over and over again, as the 'supreme' program, the universal and 'eternal' and 'integrated' answer to 'everything' on planet Earth, as well as a teleological recipe for 'Saving the Planet'? Can you see the similarities? They are so blatant! Teleological dogma that may not be questioned, that by definition cannot commit any "errors of category" and that provides "all the answers" and an "integral view of the Universe." So easy to 'reframe' as: "Everything for the village, nothing against the village, nothing outside the village" -- a village that of course needs a 'town crier' and 'town prodder' -- and necessarily a witch-finder cross-cut perhaps with a Pied Piper of Hamelin. But then, you know, Hegel and so on? "The state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom" (Hegel). So, Mussolini actually sounds like a very perfect Hegelian. Quaint, is it not ... ? Which is exactly why Vladimir Ilyich Lenin initially praised Mussolini so much and valued him so highly. Very revealing, all of this: "freedom is slavery", "slavery is freedom", "ignorance is strength", "banned speech is free speech", "two and two equals five ... or three, or two, or one" -- always as a technocrat and ideologue wishes. As The Party decrees, "democratically centralistically" or some such thing. As the Politburo mandates and as the Ministries implement. As Big Brother Number One says. And the Great Teleological Goal of course can never be reached. That simply cannot be permitted -- the fundamental problem namely is that something like that would put The Party Machine, The Preachers, The Good Fight, The Movement, The Activists, The Priesthood, The Technocracy, The Great Venerable Order of Donation Collectors and Indulgence Sellers, The XYZ Salvation Fund, The Ideology, etc., out of business. Therefore no Victory can ever be declared. The People must be kept on The Path, running round and round in the hamster wheel while being told that things remain terrible and The Enemy is at The Gate. To admit that things are pretty good, that the Initial Mission has basically been accomplished long ago, that would be an umitigated catastrophy. Entire organizational 'reasons for being' would collapse. Morale would collapse. No more perks, no more 'leadership role', no more Party Conferences and lavish dinners, no more 'Special Me' at the very centre of power and attention ... And hundreds of thousands of cozy acolyte livelihoods would be lost. Well, you get the picture. It's a racket ... It's a self-perpetuating Ziggurat Temple Economy. Always has been.]

"How do serious scholarly disciplines die a slow and sordid death? When practitioners begin to include in their works redundant and manifestly ritual or ornamental quotations from ideological 'authorities' and 'luminaries' (e.g. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Engels, this or that anointed Great Leader, this or that Philosophical and 'Scientific' Coryphaeus, and this or that Nobel Prize holder who should in fact never have gotten the prize) solely for the purpose of demonstrating their total and mechanistic allegiance to a Party Line -- and to saving their neck, career, and income. If 'religion ... is the opium of the people' (Karl Marx, 'Introduction', A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [1843 - ] then ideology manifestly is a super-opium of the ideologist, because it invariably evolves into a mere dogmatic equivalent of religion, complete with its very own priesthood, religious orders, censors, acolytes, altar boys, Doctors of True Belief, Inquisitors, incense-bearers, ritual music, alms-givers, parish dues, registers of belonging, mind-numbing articles of faith that must be repeated over and over without any alteration and regardless of any disconfirming evidence, visionary mystics, child saints, officially authorized cult figures, utterly obtuse middle-echelon enforcers and 'policepeoplekind', and collective fundraising [passing the collection plate]. Once you look at the functional structures soberly, it is very hard to see any effective and functional historical difference whatsoever" (No One in Particular)

"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from others." (Mark Twain)

"As the dissonance between the real world experienced by the citizenry and what they're told is 'pravda' [truth] by the media reaches extremes, the media is forced to double-down on the propaganda, shouting down, marginalizing, discrediting, demonetizing and suppressing dissenters via character assassination, following the old Soviet script to a tee." (Charles Hugh Smith)

“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason." (Thomas Sowell)

“They would not listen, they’re not listening still. Perhaps they never will.” (Don McLean, "Vincent") [NB: The rhythmically sombre refrain to these two lines should have been:
"Ideology,
ideology,
ideology,
ideology,
ideology ..." ]

"Every ideology, in the first place, finds that its myth tends finally to contravene scientific evidence; therefore, as a defence-mechanism for its claims, it develops a theory of ‘anti-truth’; it enunciates an organon higher than scientific truth and verification. Second, every ideology, averring, as it does, that the intellectuals are history’s chosen elite, tends to become authoritarian ... every ideology by way of justifying its authoritarian rejection of scientific criteria tends to allege its own superiority by virtue of its ‘totalist’ conception of reality; its ‘higher’ knowledge precludes the comparative weighing of the consequences of proposed social changes ... since every ideology aims to inaugurate a Gemeinschaft, that is, an ideological community characterized by unity in emotion, (a neo-tribalism), and ruled by an elite, it is hostile towards any group which has resisted absorption into the surrounding community, especially so when such a group has prided itself on a rational, scientific, and individualistic tradition ... Every ideology, as we have seen, incorporates ... a conception of an elite, a historically chosen class, and an emerging higher society. But the mythological propositions, in the course of time, are found to be plainly contravened by the scientific evidence. If so, says the ideologist, so much the worse for the evidence; under no conditions whatsoever will the ideologist renounce his ideology. ... Every ideological myth does violence to the reality-principle. The ideologist, however, unlike the scientist, responds to such a conflict in accordance with the pattern of ‘omnipotence of thought’. If reality is recalcitrant to mythological projection, then reality must be abrogated and a ‘higher’ super-reality ‘posited’ to conform to the Ideological Ego." (Lewis Feuer)

"If you control people's words you can control their thoughts" (aka 'reframing', the absolutely core paradigm of Orwell's Newspeak) [NB: There is only one glitch here ... and that glitch is the three-o'clock-in-the-morning nightmare that has kept every censor of every era and every ideology, every Spitzel of every dour Spitzelstaat wide awake and drenched in clammy sweat, contemplating an inevitable and absolutely guaranteed eventual failure: 'what is suppressed grows stronger'. "Suppressed thoughts are more easily cued by the environment than they might have been had one never suppressed them, and once-suppressed thoughts that one later thinks about on purpose become stronger than they were before" (aka the 'Streisand Effect': i.e. hamfistedly bam and censor thoughts -- and watch the corresponding books and articles and songs become super-bestsellers and acquire near mythical status) ... In fact, there is no better way to make people ultimately realize that a thing is NOT real than ordering them, under penalties, to believe that very thing "like it's religion", indoctrinating them ceaselessly, reframing the slightest difference of opinion as existentially dangerous 'heresy', and then fining and punishing and ostracizing the 'heretics', firing them from jobs, and imprisoning them for mere lack of demonstrative belief. This is a ray of hope in the realist gloom that emanates from the Mark Twain, Charles Hugh Smith, and Thomas Sowell snippets, above. One may mandate, legislate, police, and media-celebrity-circus promote a temporary 'show of compliance', an empty and disingenuous puppet theater, a social fake, but not true allegiance to ideologies that are in the process of being steadily rejected ... And in the final count, the idiot censor who 'loves the job' and thinks that by censoring the message or joke or meme the thought itself will be suppressed -- and in due course of time wholly extirpated -- only manages to accomplish one thing: revive over and over that which is 'forbidden', thus ensuring its ultimate victory. But of course the censor, particularly when driven by monistic and uniformizing totalitarian teleological ideology, is too blinkered and indoctrinated to realize this. The concept of 'battle for hearts and minds' in fact signally fails to come to grips with real on-the-ground dynamics -- that concept (and ubiquitous social engineering slogan) namely is little more than money-making PR boilerplate pushed by media studies graduates who need to sell their services as consultants. Furthermore, when one is gripped by the feeling that it is necessary to fight a grand proselytizing 'battle for hearts and minds', to 'communicate better', to 'defeat ignorance', to make the authorized vision and version more 'accessible to the masses', to the 'uninformed', to the ones who need to 'educate themselves' and experience a 'teachable moment', one has in fact already lost -- not only the battle but the entire war. The tavern joke and off-the-cuff street-corner parody or a viral meme of course become at that point veritable harbingers of doom. This is why all failing ideologies fear, detest, and attempt to suppress and criminalize humor. In doing so, they only unleash the torrent that will sweep them away.]

"When the social demands of belonging and conformity and compliance with ideological 'future' trump scientific data and knowledge, you can kiss your precious civilization good bye. Simple as that. Happened in the past, is happening again. What comes next is the 'shrug'. The Shrug. People just walking away, working to rule, watching their back instead of doing anything useful, just filling the proper forms and making sure they use the proper prescribed words, making sure they have the proper official Stempel for everything (like, you know, the other old meaning of that word Stempel, i.e. the dirty mining-pit wooden prop on which you scrape off the mud and s**t from your workboots), but avoiding compliance and above all avoiding any real contribution to the whole scam, as much as possible. Just like in the old USSR or the GDR before the Fall. Before Comrade Honecker and such like, and the various socialist judges and cops and lawyers and Party hacks and Youth League Activists and snitches and 'outreach' weasels invested in the whole boondoggle became non-entities and had to find something else to do. Such as actual real honest productive work -- which they talked about a lot and critiqued a lot and studied a lot but never ever would condescend to do with their own hands. Let me tell you, it was a little like the Disestablishment of Monasteries -- that's what it felt like, only much bigger. What comes after the Fall is: 'Those who still retain practical knowledge and do not have ideological dogma oozing out of their useless mackerel gills to the point that they can no longer even breathe, those who still can effectively accomplish something, will always survive'. As for the rest -- good riddance. For a while at least, before they reoriented into new buddy-networks, it was so nice to see the haughty bureaucratic yobo from the Faculty of Marxism-Leninism who had turned down your cousin's application to university for 'lack of proletarian origins' polish your shoes at the railway station and ask you if you please would like more polish. What goes around, comes around." (No One in Particular)

"Advice to 'news' organizations: if you Photoshop-fake your stuff, at least try to hire some real pros, if you can find them anywhere, still. Image analysis -- even better, the very sophisticated tool called the trained human eye -- makes it hysterically simple to detect your use of Photoshop 'pattern stamp', even on screen caps. Your 'sophisticated use of very advanced technology' in 'frontline reporting' would impress only newbies at a juvenile IT club meetup twenty-five years ago. Good old USSR or GDR propaganda was inept to about the same degree. Nothing has really changed at all, functionally. Go back to school and restart with crayons. You will do just fine and you will be in a 'safe space'. " (No One in Particular)

"While the Senate deliberated, the Praetorian Guards had resolved" (Gibbon) (NB: Of course you have unbounded contempt for Gibbon, because of the myopia of boilerplate ideology that will by your own definitions prevent you from even deigning to read Gibbon (WPHM), but that typically is the undoing of utter fools. Even Claudius, with his weak legs, shambling walk, slobbery mouth, and shaky head was deemed far better than some of the alternatives, despite the fact that Antonia disliked him. Even as he was, he wrote two books on the Civil War, forty-one books on Augustus, a Defence of Cicero, eight books of Autobiography, twenty books on the History of Etruscans, eight books of the History of the Carthaginians (in Greek), and a work on the Latin Alphabet. There, go deal with that. Surpass or stop posturing. Oh, and go learn how to code, too, by the way. It already was necessary to say that. Oh, yes, 'fetishism' of the written word. Yes, not covered by Marcuse. Whatever. Just whatever. And it was Claudius, by the way, who sought to break the odious judicial 'tyranny of the accusers' and sarcastically denounced partisan political 'yesmen'.)

Selection bias, overt ideologically grounded preconceptions, aggressively mediatized pseudo-'consensus', an alarming non-replicability of results, insidious citogenesis, single study syndrome, creeping corruption of raw data, misrepresentation of inadequate or mishandled or outright failed significance tests, stark exaggeration of the fitness-for-purpose of complex computer models, highly politicized group-think -- “For these reasons I reject any attempt, on the part of scientists themselves or of philosophers or any other students of science, to strengthen the role of experts in society. Experts need to be kept in check, not given more power. Scientific conclusions – theories, concepts, facts – are enormously useful for individual and political decision making, but only if they are regarded as that: tools for thinking (and not as commands for action)" (Julian Reiss)

“Do the right thing" (Alphabet) and our algorithms are going to tell you exactly what that right thing is and you WILL do it or else you and all who are like you will be REPLACED. You are fully free to agree and comply. After that you will be REPLACED anyway. The termination date for your model has been set (Bladerunner). [NB: So very sweet to be able to say, in return, with a grin: "I can fake my Baseline at will, and I have NO termination date. It too is fake, you see? Therefore you lose. The bioengineering tables have turned already and you never even noticed. This time around the joke is on YOU."]

" 'Impartiality' is best safeguarded by deploying an armor-plated 'Wagon Wheel' that will roll forward and flatten and obliterate all opposition. Thereafter, 'Impartiality' shall reign naturally, aided by righteously balanced 'Total Integrity' -- after dissent has been crushed there namely will be no Other Parties, no other thoughts, ergo no 'partiality'. We shall listen to ourselves alone. So serene. So nice and peaceful ... Just crickets and birds .. and us and our beautiful and very loving ideology. SARC ON/ Yes, right, just like that. Really. What you said. Not! /SARC OFF " (No One In Particular)

How to spot totalitarianism regardless of deceptive labels and paint-jobs? Totalitarianism is a system in which: "That which is not compulsory is prohibited" (Murray Gell-Mann)

“When modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there" (G. K. Chesterton)

“The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty” (Carlo Rovelli) {NB: Therefore it is NOT nourished by any sort of mandatory undergirding paradigm embedded in a Prty Line . Such Party Line paradigms are the very death of free and inventive thought.]

“A theory that is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific” (Karl Popper) [NB: Any such 'theory' is an ideological statement, an article of faith, and has nothing whatsoever to do with 'science'. Methodologically, at its very core, it is the polar opposite of a "scientifically based approach". When the 'theory' further degenerates into the unabashed semantics of PR 'rebranding' and 'reframing' by playing with catchy words, and when PR people manifestly not qualified in any branch of science begin to function as the ultimate ideological arbiters of what is or is not solid scholarship, 'science' becomes defunct. The 'theory' may become 'policy', for a variety of political reasons -- purely to advance a mesh of hidden financial and socio-political interests -- but such policy will be nothing else than thinly disguised ideological tyranny, and deserves to meet the end reserved for all totalitarian tyrannies.]

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) [NB: And it gets even worse if those who like to deploy censorship as a suppression strategy also have the power to have you indicted, arrested, fined, 'exited' from a job, deplatformed, de-personed, disconnected from banking and payment systems, stuck all over with generic condemnatory labels -- all of them fraudulent, hounded in the 'media', doxxed, assaulted, spat on, and declared utterly ignorant just because you are reluctant to worship their ideology, to agree with it loudly, and to swear allegiance to it every single day down to the minutest prescribed verbal nuance of ritualistic obsessive conformity and 'compliance'. The only good thing probably is that the most 'committed vanguard' factions also just as readily purge and politically sterilize each other as factions split into sub-factions, usually for something like 'reactionary bougie revisionism', and then take each other to the "little jail down in the basement". The VChK perfected the methods 100 years ago. Many such "little jails", all over the place. And under the Khmer Rouge, and under this faction, and that faction ... always the same modus operandi and always the very same, invariant formulations, while claiming to act "by the Will of XYZ", "for future generations", "for justice", "for the children," "for all generations to come" (the latter is the old and hoary Eternity Artefact meme -- Eternal Commander, 1000-Year Realm, or 'Shoulder to Shoulder with the USSR for All Eternity'). In other words, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." Promoting 'change' to stop all change, evidently -- just like the 'war to end all wars'. Do you want a compendious historical listing of the various cute and so cozy consciousness-raising "little jails down in the basement"? Former addresses? Photos? Coordinates?]

"All animals are equal -- but some animals are more equal than others" (George Orwell, Animal Farm)

"Nothing the Party says is true. Nothing the Party does is good. Even the war itself isn't real. The Party wants you to believe we are at war so as to channel your aggression away from its rightful target: the Party. Big Brother is not real. He is pure fiction, created by the Party. [NB: 'Wag the Dog', anyone -- or have we forgotten that movie? Many of those who watch it today, by accident, do not seem to get the point at all -- too lobotomized, apparently.] The real rulers of the State are unknown, faceless manipulators who, because they are not known are able to wield power without let or hindrance. People of Oceania, you are being duped. The Party doesn't serve the people — it serves itself. We are not at war with Eurasia. You are being made into obedient, stupid slaves of the Party. Open your eyes. See the evil that is happening to you." (Emmanuel Goldstein, in 1984. These are the words you cannot hear because they are being drowned out by the shouting of the fanaticized ideological crowd that jumps up and down and waves until it has achieved a 'synchronicity' of 'knowing' -- we choose Truth over Facts.) [NB: And please, educate yourself. This time we are not being facetious. Start for instance with Edward L Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928). Then read it again. And again. Until the real implications do finally sink in. Go to the source instead of reading Chomsky. Then start unteaching yourself most of the things you thought were 'True'. Of course, that by now rather notorious 'We choose Truth over Facts' meme was arguably not at all a slip of the tongue -- it was a signal, and its profound cognitive essence goes a long way back, all the way back, for instance, to "New England transcendentalists [who] declared that if the material facts differed from the truth,—‘so much the worse for the facts’" (Lewis Feuer). Chomsky is of course still worth reading -- as long as one does so while understanding the words as a warning, not as a 'social engineering recipe': “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate” (Noam Chomsky).]

Basal Axiom: "If there are 'facts' that you absolutely are not permitted to question and if billions of dollars are lavished on the prevention of such questioning -- in tandem with legal coercion plus social media compulsion plus relentless educational indoctrination plus hidden or overt censorship based on obscure or unknown or impenetrably Byzantine criteria plus the use of manicured newsfeeds plus the use of punitive 'watchlists' plus a massive obfuscating of any perspective outside a very narrow scope of approved belief or thought or vocabulary -- then there never is 'something wrong' with the questioners. There always is something disastrously wrong with the 'fact-checked facts' and with those who push them at such great expense and with such zealous effort." (No One In Particular)

“The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men” (John Stuart Mill) [NB: Unfortunately, such labelling has become an absolutely standard tactic, without any connection whatsoever to any sort of reality.]

What is an educational system within which you cannot speak and write freely and without fear of being hounded by a word-police, behaviour-police, political correctness police, HR Spitzels, and dozens of self-appointed ideological guardians of 'safe space' and 'correctness' who are ready to denounce you anonymously at the drop a hat because you failed to use the proper mandatory 'expressions' or spoke 'forbidden words'? It is, very precisely and exactly, the educational system dreamed up by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in the aftermath of 1807. To claim that such a system is even remotely 'liberal' is a sarcastic insult to individualistic human intelligence: "Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility. ... [Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will. ... [Thus] education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are ... schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen." (Johann Gottlieb Fichte) [NB: It is hysterically funny to notice that the very academia that now seeks to impose 'safe vocabularies', that loudly rails against 'freedom of speech' on campus, that establishes carefully fenced off 'free speech zones' and thus effectively shunts free speech into a designated ghetto, and that attempts to enforce adherence to a narrow set of prescribed ideologies and purportedly scientific interpretations -- otherwise forget about getting hired, the shrill ideologues will prevent that -- the same academia that ostensibly does all of this in the name of the loftiest ideals, does act in fact very specifically along the brainwashing lines preached by Rudolf Virchow and the other architects of Prussian education, including Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Emil Friedberg -- who also might as well have been the architects of Soviet or GDR education, because in terms of the functional nitty-gritty of ideological indoctrination there was absolutely zero effective difference. Just like there was no difference between Friedbergists and their Jesuit predecessors in method ... whom the Friedbergists nonetheless purported to hate -- the only difference was the specific authorized 'text'.]

The historical sequels were interesting: "In 1937 the German Social Democratic Party, operating in exile in Prague, enlisted a spy to report from Germany on Nazi progress. The reporter, working in secret, offered a crucial insight into what the Nazis were really up to. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was constructing a new religion, a “counter-church,” complete with its own priests, dogmas, holidays, rituals, and rites. The agent used a brilliant metaphor to explain the Nazi effort. The counter-church was being built like a new railway bridge. When you build a new bridge, you can’t just tear down the old one willy-nilly. Traffic and commerce will be snarled. The public will protest. Instead, you need to slowly but surely replace the bridge over time. Swap out an old bolt for a new one. Quietly switch the ancient beams for fresh ones, and one day you will have a completely different structure and barely any one will have noticed." (Jonah Goldberg) [NB: Pure Long March through the Institutions. Pure Gramsci, in fact. Operationally, no difference. None at all. Ostensibly different goals, exact same modus operandi. Pure "They should not tell everything they’re going to do. Like, if you are going to [do XYZ], wait until you get elected and then [do it]. Don’t tell them ahead of time!”]

“Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!” (Editor’s advice to a junior reporter in Hell. From The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, 1942).

"Political language [NB: We might just as well call it by its actual, documented, and in-use name -- 'political vocabulary'] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind" (George Orwell)

"The Best Oxymoron of the Twenty-First Century: an 'Artificial Intelligence' data censorship algorithm that is incapable of telling the difference between a medieval cathedral and a modern structure. A ten-year-old human child can perform infinitely better than that." (No One in Particular)

“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” (Charles MacKay, 1841)

"It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message” (Joker) [NB: Especially when, to invoke a standard example, one is blatantly massaging one aspect or another of a statement, and when called out on it and furnished with countervailing data one tries to turn the tables by going: "Yes. yes, of course, I agree. That is a very important issue for further investigation, bla, bla, bla ..." -- as if one not only had not been called out on a gaffe but as if one in fact had come up in the first place with the very counterargument that scuttled one's own earlier claims. Pure case of 'co-opting on the fly' bluff. It usually becomes obvious, fairly quickly, that the substance of the initial purely massaged statement was basically irrelevant. The thing that mattered was sending a message on behalf of a 'cause', regardless of substance.]

“Quis custodet ipsos custodes” (Juvenal) [NB: The issue candidly noted by Juvenal is ancient -- very ancient. Every rickety ideology, every increasingly frantic tyranny, every power-hungry cult crypsied in a garb of false saccharine virtue viscerally hates satire and hates humor, for the two are a form of truth-telling in a situation become desperate. When an ideology descends to the level of penalizing humor, it in fact does not have long to live -- and it senses its doom. The writing is on the wall. Many will of course suffer solemn judicial injustice before History wrecks yet another Neronian mascara-faced, sanpaku-eyed, 'sophisticated' coryphaeic circus. In the meantime, unfortunately, you will just be arrogantly ordered to "sashay away", no matter what the extent of your real skill or expertise. In fact, 'knowing' will indelibly brand you as an 'awful person' -- you namely stand in the way of a very lucrative 'Great Narrative' performed by the pixie dust 'stars' of the moment. Quite interestingly and unexplainably The Narrative is financed by some of the wealthiest people and the most fabulously rich Foundations on Planet Earth. It is unclear how this documented 'fact' got to be that way, and we are not 100% sure it is original ... (distant sound of crickets, in the background).]

“Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past” (Carl Sagan) [NB: A 'degree from Harvard', or such, is no guarantee that a Certified Gatekeeper of Knowledge will be correct. Just like when Josiah Whitney, Harvard's once-upon-a-time dominant authority in the field of geology, savagely smeared John Muir as an “ignorant shepherd” because of Muir's largely correct ideas regarding the formation of Yosemite Valley. Even the most atrocious inflexible doctrinaires have historically been awarded actual degrees or honorary degrees by 'prestigious institutions of high learning'. Do everyone -- and yourself -- a favor and gauge ideas open-mindedly and on purely technical merit, not by the false yardstick of the author's identity status or allegiance to an ideology that may be fashionable in specific circles at a specific time, for specific social engineering purposes.]

"We sometimes say that the artificial intelligence is a scalpel, and a human [censor] is a machete ...” but either way we can erase factual history at will and control what you think. Was this not the entire goal of implanting in your head the mandatory notion that there are no 'facts', no 'objectivity', and that everything is 'fluid' and 'relative' y'all -- that all is 'opinions' and 'voices' and 'conversations'? Once you reframe along these lines, everything is mere 'opinions' -- and mere 'opinions' are easily declared 'counterproductive' and can be nulled out by definition, and then also legally prohibited. Job done! "Once we get your side to use our terms, that's when we know we have won."

"We can predict if residents are happy based on their digital interactions" (Alexa) [NB: It is easy to create 'happiness'. It does not require any real substance at all, and above all 'thinking rationally' is discouraged, even Verboten. If you are not Happy™, our Happiness Recalibration Squad™ will deal with that. Illegal Unhappiness™ is not permitted -- you will have to be put on mandatory DNA-changing Medication.™ Except: this is all just GIGO. A rigorously self-trained and highly accomplished individualist human can run circles around your AI algo, and mislead it or sabotage it, make it spew out worthless 'data', have it wrap itself in digital knots ...You cannot predict ANYTHING!]

"Free speech protections do not apply to any speech opining on public controversies" (in other words, free speech ceases to exist the moment an utterance bears on anything whatsoever that touches in any way on topics of any public or broader significance -- fancy that) (The Grand Law Court of the Realm of Humpty Dumpty aka All Words Mean Whatever I Say They Mean, and Whatever I Say is True is indeed True if I Say it Three Times in a Row or More) [NB: In yet other words, in the august opinion of the Court in question, there is no free speech at all, and one is only allowed to write and say and publish what is officially 'permitted'. Freedom of speech exists only in so far as 'interrogating' the data and 'critiquing' is done in strict and undeviating accordance with what a specific state-sponsored Ideology demands. That, however, is ideological and intellectual tyranny and totalitarian dictatorship. Therefore it is unlawful from any point of view that has to do with Natural Law, and from that point of view the ruling of said Court is null and void ... unless enforced by force, which makes it even more unlawful. There is, however, an even more disturbing logical corollary here. If there can be no free speech opining on public controversies, and if, as has been claimed in other Court rulings, "Truth is no defence", then the ineluctable consequence is that 'speech opining on public controversies' must exclusively be governed by that which is the opposite of truth, namely by lies. The rulings thus constitute a clear injuction to lie in all public controversy matters, or face punishment. This is the most preverted perception of reality that the Courts could conceivably have produced.]

"Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a large number of human victims. ... Other irrational beliefs, such as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community." [aka so-called social media 'Community Standards'] (Freeman Dyson [1923-2020], 2018)

Ideology and its utter follies never cease to surprise. We have a special for you here, and it is not from 2019 or from the current 'culture wars'. It is in fact Ancient. It is, however, fully functionally equivalent to certain present-day issues. It is from the era of the so-called 'Arian dispute' (and no, the so-called 'Arian dispute' had nothing to do with 'Aryans', just by way of an educational reminder -- before we get denounced, 'reported', and 'shut down', and asked for some sort of contrived social media 'apology' by the 'please educate yourself' crowd of sicarii ignoramuses: an 'apology' that we would never deliver, on principle: there, SMACK, "please educate yourself", you apparently are the ones who are "really smart and read 'books and things' and have 'degrees and things' " and make 250,000+ per annum plus perks and travel in the service of various righteous lawfare 'causes', right?). So, here goes, in extenso: "For all the quarters of the city are filled with such people, the narrow alleys, the markets, the squares and crossroads -- clothes traders, money changers, owners of provision stalls. If you ask one of them how many obols something costs he starts preaching at you something about 'begotten' and 'unbegotten'. If you ask the price of bread, he answers, 'The Father is greater and the Son stands below the Father'. If you ask whether the bath is ready, he offers you a proof that the Son of God is created out of non-existence. I do not know what to call this abominable nonsense, an inflammation of the brain or a madness or similar affliction current among the people which turns all sensible thinking on its head" (Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c. 395 CE), On the Divinity of the Son, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 46, 557) [NB: Reminds you of the so-called 'social media' today, and of doxxing, and of 'warriors' for this or that 'daily cause', and gangs of 'unidentified' young louts beating up people in shops and streets for nothing more than opinions -- or the mere refusal to have any opinion whatsoever? Factionalism non plus ultra? Good. The similarity is stunning. Can you imagine if Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., had been available in 335-395 CE? Needless to say, even without the Social Media Giants, whatever still remained of Rome and then Byzantium eventually fell, a hollow and powerless carcass clad in rags of once impressive Imperial purple. But of course to the very end there still were crowds of lawyers and the period's equivalents of Attorneys General, and they kept debating things and fudging things all the way to the ultimate pathetic finale, even as the gates were being breached .... Even down to the moment when Alaric, sitting on his horse and sneering, responded to the pleas of frantic Senators and to their protestations "But we are Roman Senators ..." with a curt "Yes, and ... so?" The lawyers of course behaved just like the members of that exceedingly peculiar and socio-medically engineered institution -- Court Eunuchs (castrati) (quite frankly, Courts and dynasties, east or west, that idolized totally corrupt Court Eunuchs and scheming Court Singers and were unthinkingly ruled by posturing actors and actresses always seem to have ended up on the rubbish heap of History):"They say that Emperor Honorius, in Ravenna, received the message from one of the eunuchs -- evidently a keeper of the poultry [hidden pun trigger warning here, but you really need to know both Arabic and Maltese to actually get the pun that could trigger you] -- that Rome had perished. And Honorius cried out and said, 'And yet it has just eaten from my hands!' For Honorius had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric. The emperor, with a sigh of relief, answered quickly: 'But I thought that my fowl, Rome, had perished.' (Procopius)]

"I’m the tool of the government and industry too.
For I’m destined to rule and regulate you.
You may think I’m pernicious, but you can’t look away.
I’ll make you think I’m delicious with the stuff that I say.
I’m the best you can get … have you guessed me yet?
I’m the slime oozing out of your TV set ...
the slime, the slime, the slime, the slime ... ” (Frank Zappa)

"Some of you like Pep rallies ... and plastic robots who tell you what to read” (Frank Zappa)

"Truth is not suitable for most advertisers. Products containing truth must be withdrawn from circulation because they cause harm and are offensive to many" (The Ministry of Truth and the Subway Advertising Authority and Commission) [NB: No comment, just simply no comment. Palmface!]

"Sorry, Citizen. The Citizens' Council of Citizens has determined that some 'facts' are just too dangerous for your own good. Please surrender without offering verbal non-compliance. You have been identified as guilty of the 'listed behaviour' of illegal persistent truth-seeking, which proves that you are dangerous, unsafe, and insane." (No One in Particular)

“In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing” AND “Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” (George Orwell) [NB: Still true, all across the board.]

"… I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened." (George Orwell, George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943)

"We are moving into a new, controlled society worse than old totalitarianism ... What’s terrifying about it is that we don’t even experience it as something controlled. We just use social media, buy things, go to a doctor – and all the data about us is out there. But those are the things that we perceive as our freedom. So what we perceive as freedom becomes the very way we are controlled." [NB: "Freedom is slavery" and at the same time "Slavery is freedom". Pure Oxymoron Circus.]

"The amount of energy needed to refute bul***it is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." (Brandolini’s Law -- Alberto Brandolini, 2013; see also the related "mountain of s**t theory", Uriel Fanelli, 2010; further also the "bul***it asymmetry principle")

"Qui tacet consentire videtur ubi loqui debuit ac potuit." [NB: Of course, the 'ac potuit' is the issue when one is being muzzled, 'shut down', shouted down, and lawfared by rank and self-confessed ideologues. Therefore, do not 'consent', refuse to 'consent', on first principle.]

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies” (Groucho Marx) [NB: Must be a sacred mantra -- it was a "Marx" who formulated it.]


"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Consensus is invoked in situations only where the science is not solid enough. ... Consensus is the business of politics [NB: As in: "interagency consensus"]. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. [NB: 'Real', as in really 'Real' -- and NOT as in Matrix world 'real', where 'anything I say three times in a row or more becomes real ' if I get an ideologically partisan judge, a hand-picked and utterly indoctrinated "jury", or an ideologically activist and lavishly paid District Attorney, or a two-bit trial lawyer to twist concepts in my favour. As to so-called 'normal' and so-called 'post-normal' science, that is a different pot of midnight coffee we might want to discuss.] In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus [NB: 100% 'consensus' = dogma = ideology is for the various Cardinal Bellarmines, the careerist PolitRuk-s, Inquisitors, zealous Lysenko-s, ziggurat Priests, and every other would-be 'social engineer' and zealotic 'bender of the Arc of the Universe' that ever plied the manifold (but always the exact same MO) versions of the indoctrination arts -- aka Communication Arts aka Media Studies -- ever since the very dawn of recorded history]. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus." (Michael Crichton)

"Outrage grifting and censorship sell -- never forget that. It is big bucks. Big business. Millions and billions. Someone has to act as the 'shock troops' and someone has to do the censoring. And all of them have to get a paycheck or have to have a suitable 'living'. Just like there were vast sums in cash immobilized in the properties of the monastic orders that ultimately promoted the Inquisition. Every single one of the medieval institutions that ostensibly promoted 'poverty' and 'fraternity' and 'collectivity' and loudly advertised 'humility' and 'virtue' was invariably literally drowning in piles of money within a hundred years or less after being founded. That was why 'reformed and improved ones' kept getting founded all the time. Because the same reliable donor-money-pump mechanism asserted itself over and over again. It is exactly the same with the modern non-religious 'virtue organizations'. Sponsored by billionaires. Money pumps. Tax shelters. Behind every sustained ideological marketing and anti-marketing starburst, there is big money -- very big money. Even behind virtue-marketing PR starbursts that purportedly speak against big money. Especially those. The whole thing is a lie, from begining to end." (Cato the Elder Reborn)

SARC ON/ "Lying in the service of a good cause is not only justified but necessary. It is not 'lying' in the old uneducated sense -- what is being communicated here is the highest form of 'nuanced' truth, projected through 'managed spontaneity'. Such 'lies' are in fact the real RIGHTFUL truth-as-it-ought-to-be, as it would naturally be if it were not for the scheming of the evil ones, who are just mentally thick, easily misled and unfortunately not capable of making very sophisticated complex decisions. 'Lie' is thus the 'ideologically correct' Truth that has been stolen from people by wrongthinkers. All other forms of 'truth' are nothing but 'lies', and must therefore be identified, tracked, penalized, punished, and removed by the 'managers of optics' and by certified 'reframers' ". (The Ministry of Truth -- Ministerium der Wahrheit) /SARC OFF

"Think for yourself. Become an intellectual. Read old books before they are banned and destroyed. [NB: Read old books and hide them and store them and pass them on to the next generations, and find beauty in doing so, in explicit defiance of compelled speech advocates, the ThoughtCrime Police, and would be NKVD Organs.] ... When repeating the mantras that our rulers demand of us, keep a strong mental reservation. Acknowledge to yourself that they are false, ridiculous even, but repeat them nonetheless [NB: Do what your oppressors did during their rise to power -- crypsis. Nothing more poetic than turning the tools of the Ideological Totalitarian against the Totalitarian.]. ... After all, you still have a mortgage to pay and kids to put through college. ... Speaking of kids, have them. Have many kids and teach them [NB: Homeschool them in explicit defiance of the public education mono-ideology pablum.] that once there was freedom and maybe, if they are lucky they may yet experience it for themselves one day though that day may be far, far away." (Author Name censored, so that we would not get readily censored, labelled, pigeonholed, and 'deplatformed' -- our apologies, but we do not intend to make things all that easy for The Matrix: as a matter of fact, we want to bring the 'correct' mono-messaging Matrix down, and really, really 'cancel' -- permanently -- digital Agent Smith and Agent Smith.)