Tag: Propaganda

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Does it Make Sense Anymore?

We are beginning to relax a little bit, all of us.

masks The disease has ebbed down to a trickle—no deaths, a handful of cases.

We’ve reached a level of herd immunity that makes us all breathe a little bit better.  Most of us have been vaccinated or have had Covid and recovered and are in no danger of giving or getting the disease.  The elderly who would be most affected by Covid—anyone who wanted the shot—have all had the ability to get it by now.

And the disease itself, though awful for some, did not increase the overall death rate and was not as lethal as the flu.  It also affected primarily the elderly (the majority of those in nursing homes), and for the most part, did not affect the young at all.

In addition,  Covid  has always had a 99.97% recovery rate.

And then there is the effectiveness of the mask itself.  Even Fauci in earlier days not only stated that masks were not all that effective, but said that many who died during the Spanish flu did so because of bacterial infections caused by masks.  Masks pose definite health risks.  And the advantages are mostly speculative—it’s POSSIBLE that they might help if someone sneezes or coughs.  But that is not scientific.  Scientifically, the mask, (especially the non-medical grade mask), has not been proven to be effective in preventing transmission to others  or in protecting the wearer (see aier.com on masks).

And we are so far past 15 days to slow the spread that it is ridiculous. The goalpost has been moved so many times that we are beginning to become skeptical of pretty much everything the “experts” tell us.

So for many reasons,  Covid is waning.  We all want it to be a distant memory as soon as possible.  Well, not all of us, but I’ll get to that later.  We are hoping that the lockdowns, the isolations and the masks are behind us.  It is beginning to look that way in most states.

In fact, the mask mandate has been lifted in my state, although some have been  a bit afraid to take their masks off — not so much because they really think that they will give or get Covid, but because they don’t want to be different.  They don’t want to be hassled in a grocery store.  They want to go in and shop unnoticed, anonymous, a part of the crowd. They want to be invisible to others, not stand out. They look around to see if anyone is wearing the mask and then will follow the same path.

I get that.   I have felt the same way too.  It is only recently that I felt that kindness meant NOT wearing the mask in public.  I used to think that if it made people feel better, that it was kindest to just wear the mask for them.  But I am now realizing that it is kinder not to wear it.

But the hardest part of walking into a store maskless was the idea that I might stand out. I might get hassled. I might get disapproval.  I had no qualms about the disease, only about being different, standing out among the crowd.  I just wanted to do my shopping and leave without anybody noticing.

So it was — at first, at least—with butterflies in my stomach and wobbly knees that I walked in to establishments completely maskless.

And wonderful things started happening. There are many who hate the masks, including the people who work at the stores.  When they see me maskless, they feel like they get to pull their masks down too—at least under their nose so they can breathe.  Other patrons take theirs off or don’t put theirs on.  When I walk in without a mask, other people realize that they can do the same. It makes people feel as if they are not alone and won’t be hassled if someone else is also mask free.

I am never rude.  I go out of my way to be nice to store personnel and out of my way to try to be friendly.    But I think it’s important to have the courage to be different right now — to live thoughtfully and deliberately.  And to inspire others to do the same.

Does it make sense anymore?

Do you really believe that you will give or get Covid if you don’t wear the mask?

If not, why are you wearing it?

When will you stop wearing it?

Will you ever stop wearing it? What would have to happen before you did?

If not now,  when?

It’s important for us to take a stand now.  To be brave now. To dare to be different.

Because if not now,  we will be wearing masks and possibly locked down forever. Really.

Something is coming that will ensure the easy transition from temporary mask to permanent mask.

Perhaps even the permanent mask that will tell on you to your elitist betters when you neglect to put it on, or wear it incorrectly, or wear it dirty or are a wimp who has to take breaths of fresh air because the mask has built up too much CO2 inside of it. (See the WEF promo for it.)

Most of us want this nightmare to be over.  But not all of us.  Some have looked at Covid as a golden opportunity.  These people have had an unprecedented taste of power and they are hungry for more—they are not going to let it go without a fight.

Fear is a great manipulator. And the next wave of fear is going to come along to try to lock us down again, to make a seamless transition from temporary to permanently masked, from formerly free to fully controlled. You can count on it.

How will you react this time?

Stay tuned…….

 

 

 

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Logical Fallacies

1) THEY SAY….

Can you explain why you believe what you believe? Have you really thought through it? Do you know the reasons behind your beliefs?

Everybody thinks….experts agree….we all know…..all the cool kids believe….all the smart people think…..

The anonymous “they say” is used quite often to lie about things, and is used extensively in propaganda.  It works particularly well when someone doesn’t  have an evidentiary basis to convince people of some idea that he wants them to espouse, like that a product works or that a politician is correct about everything and his/her opponent is wrong about everything.   It’s an easy way to con unsuspecting people into believing things that aren’t true or are highly suspect.

Facebook is notorious for using this approach and often ends up convincing people into  believing things that their Facebook friends or promoted sponsors, especially political sponsors, want people to believe.  Facebook users end up making decisions about complicated and important issues based upon cute quips or memes, or a joke from their favorite performer.  They base their opinions on an emotional reaction to a 2-second view of a post.   They just assume that everyone in their Facebook group of “friends” supposedly believes the same thing, or that some random “expert” somewhere can explain why what they say they believe is true.  And it doesn’t matter to the Facebook viewers that they themselves can’t explain why or whether the idea is true, because they have the “backing” of this “they say” group,—the “all the cool kids think,” “experts agree” “everybody  believes” factor is enough for them to not have to think about the issue on their own or to form their own opinions based upon any real thought or evidence.

https://youtu.be/DQ5QWclTfac

https://www.prageru.com/video/how-socialism-ruined-my-country/

This might be the reason why so many believe that Socialism is a great thing when they don’t really know what Socialism is.  Or why they are so quick to judge someone with an opposing viewpoint without knowing exactly why they disagree.  All that they know is that their “group” or at least someone in or behind their group believes this and so they are with the cool kids, they believe what the anonymous “everyone” knows so they don’t have to consider the issue further.

That is dangerous.  It is dangerous because it makes you vulnerable to being manipulated by other people.  It is dangerous because until you learn to think for yourself, you aren’t really living the life you ought to live.  It’s dangerous because there are people out there who have reasons to want to deceive you, whether it’s because they want to sell you a product, or because they want to take away your freedom and have total control over everything that you do.  Especially now, it’s time to put down the phone and step away from the social media, or at least pause to give yourself a chance to think vs. react to things

Especially today, it is also important to question your teachers, who may not be telling you the truth about things like history, philosophy or morality.  There are some teachers who have been hired by universities who teach ridiculous things, especially lately.  There is some curriculum that is being shoved down the throats of students today that is pure trash—completely deceitful and even manipulative. Students of today come out of college heavy laden with monumental debt, possessing useless degrees and less able to handle the real world than when they went in.  Some students have even been manipulated into a kind of paranoia about the world around them. They think  that they are eternal victims and that the rest of the world is oppressing them. They believe that they have no power to determine their own lives, and that any effort to do so is futile.  Such students end up with psychoses and even as violent criminals.   The graduates of yesterday built America and were a blessing to their families, their communities and themselves.  Today’s graduates firebomb cars. Don’t get caught in that hopeless web of lies. You are worth much more than that.  Think for yourself and determine your own future. You were made for this time and you have a purpose to fulfill.

QUESTION EVERYTHING!

It is so important to THINK and not just blindly accept ideas that are presented to us, especially when we don’t really know that background of either the people who are presenting it or the details of why they espouse what they espouse.

REMEMBER TO:

THINK FOR YOURSELF

DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH

READ ALL SIDES OF AN ISSUE AND THINK ABOUT IT ON YOUR OWN BEFORE YOU JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS

READ, THINK, ANALYZE A SUBJECT BEFORE YOU FORM AN OPINION.

This will keep you from being deceived or tricked by people who may not want the best for you.

 

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Why Free Speech?

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

Benjamin Franklin

The truth, like cream, tends to rise to the top in a free marketplace of ideas. Healthy people have a natural hunger for truth, they seek it out and generally recognize it when they find it.

A lie has to work very hard to overcome the truth and ultimately can not compete with truth.  Even after an extreme effort to promote false propaganda, a lie is often dissolved when the truth emerges.

This is exactly why free speech is so important. It is essential for anyone who truly cares about the truth.

The problem—that truth wins out over lie—is often discovered in Communist or other totalitarian governments with severely restricted public access to information.  In such governments, propaganda (false information) has to be propped up by invoking fear or censoring information that might be contrary to government power.  In WW2 Germany,  the government had to go further than that to crush wisdom, and incarcerated teachers and other professionals who might have  lead people out of the darkness of fascism.

They say that the light shines brightest in the darkness, and the light of truth shines brilliantly in the midst of evil.  When the Light of Truth involves Christianity,  persecution only fans the flame of truth and makes it grow.

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Faith,” writes Tertullian, a first century philosopher.  He observed even back then that evil’s attempts to destroy Christianity just resulted in its exponential growth,

And so lately, evil has taken a different tack.

Today, the evil do not try to crush Christianity from the outside, but do it from within.  Antonio Gramsci, a Communist propagandist described it this way:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity….In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, Universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society,”

An infiltration is when anti-Christian forces invade or buy out Christian organizations, countries, even churches and subsequently pretend to BE Christian.  As the new “Christianity,” it implements the anti-Christian agenda as if Christians are the ones promoting it.   The “changes” are couched in euphemisms—for example, when disregarding the Constitution, one describes it as a “living document”  (that one may interpret any way one feels like it).  And fundamental changes to 2,000 years of church doctrine and tradition, the Bible and the words of Jesus are explained away with the adage, “tradition is not static, it is dynamic.” (“Dynamically” changed by ME, that is.)

In each one of these examples, what the proponent is really saying is that he is going to do whatever the he__  he wants, whether you like it or not, whether it is within the rules, whether it is true or not, whether it is what a true American or Catholic or Christian would do or not.

One example of evil disguised as good  is a Communist government that creates a “Catholic church” that worships the Communist leadership, forbids Christmas, burns Catholic churches, rips children from their terrified mothers’ wombs in forced abortions and persecutes Catholics.  By calling itself Catholic, it pretends to be the same church — but the only one  “allowed” by the government.  The appeal is, here is a church that you can belong to and not be tortured. What a deal!

But it is an imposter.  Recently “legitimized,” by Communist clerics outside of the country,  it has redoubled its persecution of true Catholics and has increased its reign of terror within its borders.

But evil’s technique has gone much further than one country or even one church.   It has used the same kind of deception to try to bring down Western civilization, including whole countries and Christian churches, most notably, the Catholic church.

This has been done recently simply by anti-Christian (sometimes virulently anti-Christian) purchases of solidly Christian publications or sometimes, solidly Christian organizations or administrations.

There is so much more to say about this, but for now the most important thing to know is that propaganda’s most powerful weapon is deception.  The propagandist uses the trust that people have in him against them, to destroy them, by deceit.

How do you recognize when you are being deceived? Hopefully this blog will help.  There’s a pattern, categories of lies with very recognizable buzz words that will tip you off to what they are doing.

So, let’s get started!!