Culture of Hysteria

That's another good reason for a courtship that last longer than two weeks. Unless there is a war on and you might never see her or him again, it's better to get to know each other. And I do agree that people can hide their true selves for quite a length of time. I would guess men do this much better than women do.

I mean, you hear stories (I read one the other day) where the groom (or bride, in this case) is boinking two different men on the day of her wedding. I forget who this was. And I can't say this is gullibility, per se. I mean, some people are just so corrupt or evil, and hide it so well, that they can fool even reasonably cautious people. But it does happen.

You sort of have to laugh and chuckle the way Westley, in The Princess Bride, hectors and ridicules Buttercup for not staying true to her One True Love (Westley being in disguise at the time). She thought he was dead but, ahhh, that's no excuse if one has a True Love. She is set to marry Prince Humperdinck. But True Love was not denied in that fair tale story. Best not to ask how many women that the "Dread Pirate Roberts" had while Westley was off playing that role for presumably a year or so. Have I digressed?



Honest to god, I never understood internet dating. I mean, the internet would seem to be the worst place to find out about people. That is the precise place where you will typically find people hiding who they really are. But, that said, people do find their mates sometimes. Go figure. Maybe through extended written back-and-forth you really can learn something about a person.

And if they had treated it as flu season? Maybe a few billion in lost time/wages?

None of this is new or surprising information. But let me quote from a book that I picked up today and almost certainly won't finish: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger.



Oh, good god, yes. We saw that in the tribal impulse of the Cult of the Mask. Again, none of this is new to us.

Some of the premises of the book so far are reasonable enough. We see the allure of "tribal" society in our own society, this sense of belonging, this draw toward Utopia. Hell, I see it in my older brother's fascination with Indian tribes. But the reason I won't finish the book is brilliantly outlined by an Amazon reviewer. He does not use the word "libtard," but he might as well:



That is, I can understand why some (even back in colonial days) would pine for "tribal" communal life as lived by Indians. Searching for purpose and a sense of belonging are powerful aspects of being human.

But I think he needs to do a better apologetic of the modern industrial world. It's no use pointing out the excesses of such cultures while implicitly (or explicitly) romanticizing people who live on dirt floors. Although he cautions we should not romanticize Indian tribes who could be very cruel, I think it's very apparent that his perspective is an entirely romantic one.

That's the problem I've run across. He makes some good theoretical points, but it all seems like the second-hand drip, drip, acid-drip of Cultural Marxism eating away at established things because they are not ideally perfect and/or emotionally satisfying to the girly-men looking for love in all the wrong places. Do we pay our CEOs too much? Are there yuge income differences? Is suicide and depression more prevalent in Western cultures than primitive tribal ones?

We could answer these, yes, yes, a hundred times yes. And yet I wouldn't want to live in a culture where they shit into a hole in the ground and never heard Mozart. There are just too damn many benefits to modern culture. Is there more cause for stress? Absolutely. But I'd rather stress about which PC to buy than to do addition and subtraction on my fingers and toes. And although one certainly can get lost in "alienation" in a materialist culture, that's still your own damn fault. There is no shortage of groups to join. Or create one yourself. In a tribal culture, you have only one choice: the tribe you are in.

But this dude is honest enough to point out (appropriate to this thread):



But this is where the left wing viewpoint blinds the fellow. I might (I think, correctly) surmise that it isn't modern materialist culture, per se, that is the problem. It's feminism that is the root of the depression. And given that the reality of a woman's world in a tribal culture (which he paints as bliss) is having babies, washing the dishes, sewing, weaving baskets, and other "women's work," his own solution (return to tribal culture) is, ironically, completely non-woke and politically incorrect.

So he can promote the benefits of going "tribal," but he'd never note that feminism is the active ingredient preventing most women from settling into a way of life that isn't completely career- or materialist-driven in our modern one.

That is, Mr. Kung, it irritates me to be smarter than the book. I really do read non-fiction in order to learn something, not to watch some yute learn to walk.

Ditto on both counts. And Islam is a tribal culture. And there is no utopia in that sick, totalitarian religion.



Yes, I was watching a video the other day on why the Germanic tribes started to invade Rome. I didn't finish it because I don't think it actually explained it. This is not an uncommon occurrence for YouTube videos. There is a lot of click-bait out there.



There is no doubt that people relate to the Democrat Party/Big Government as a tribe. This is why any conservative is creeped out by such cultish thinking. Government is a necessary evil to us, not a surrogate daddy or family.



I would say that most people are dilettantes – dabblers – when it comes to the various ways they try to "get back to nature" or whatever means they use to disentangle from crass materialism. It's virtue-signaling, and especially to themselves, to fool themselves. Very few will actually give up their job to "follow their bliss" or raise children or whatever. It's all an act of self-deception.

Still, some do. And you can at least respect them for putting their money where their mouth is. But I just don't know anybody of that type. I just know lots of people who buy "dolphin-safe" tuna and think they are saving the world.

Regarding this book, the author seems to think tribal life is great because of the equality that comes from it. I won't even argue the point whether this is true or not. But the point is, that's what he thinks is attractive about tribalism to a Western man (or woman).

And I think: Why the hell would I want to be equal with some schmuck who can't tie his shoes or find his bellybutton? So, if anything, the "equality" of the tribe (as idealized by this author) is once again not news to us: It is equality of poverty, the only way such "equality" can be achieved.

But, yes, I do think many people are attracted to the idea of "equality." But the thing is, I don't trust their motives. I think 99% of the time pining for "equality" is rooted in envy. They want to bring the other guy down so that they don't feel so bad about themselves.

Prager has an article on the subject today. I didn't read it because I already know what it says. More people have been murdered in the drive for "equality" than all religious wars combined.

What real man wants merely to be equal? A man wants to achieve. He wants to stand out. He wants to produce something. Sure, he has to control his impulses and can't be manic about it (although Bill Gates was and became a gazillionaire). But in most cases, we need to value more than just pure achievement. There are many things to value.

But equality (other than under the law) isn't one of them. In fact, outside of Kindergarten where emphasis on it could be appropriate, the idea of "equality" should make any normal person shiver.

We're on the same page as these guys:

What a surprise! A vaccine that doesn't work and has serious side effects. I remember when our idiot governor Rick Perry was pushing this vaccine on preteen girls. What a corrupt ass.

Gardasil doesn't work

This piece confirms what we said from the beginning of the KFF fraud.

It was a beta test

I find the Milgram Experiment alarming, but I wonder if the sample was truly representative. The first thing I would point out is that only certain type of people would reply to an advert to take a test at some university i.e. be guinea pigs. Secondly, paying people to take a test would likely skew the participants in some way. Finally, the test took place around Yale. Crazy Yankees.

Whenever someone refers to a "classic test," it's worth being suspicious, as you are. Has it been replicated? Are the biases that you mentioned filtered out?

Still, the reality is that the Milgram Experiment merely confirmed how easily people bow to authority figures. We see this in the "climate change" scam. And we saw it with the KFF.

Would you, Mr. Kung, turn of the voltage to lethal levels in an experiment like this? I know you wouldn't. And neither would I. We might pat ourselves on the back too much. But as Dennis Prager (and others) have noted, there are only two kinds of people: the decent and the indecent.

One could also say "the skeptical and the gullible." And skepticism is an art unto itself. Paranoia and being a conspiracy theory monger are not a substitute for appropriate skepticism. To be skeptical in the first place in any manner that is not just automatic gainsaying is to be somewhat informed in a well-rounded way. The uninformed are much easier to manipulate. And the world right now is full on conspiracy theory nuts who, I believe, reach for these excesses because they haven't the brains or the background to apply skepticism, but they do sense that something is wrong.

Skepticism asks, "Okay, maybe. But show me. And show me the counter-arguments to what you are saying." A skeptic can't just be a gainsayer. He must suppose that what is being asserted could be true, or partially true. But he will also be aware of why some assertion is being made, whether true or not. He will sniff out agendas that can, and often will, blind people to the falsity of their own assertions.

And there is plenty of that going around. If you understood just minimally what CO2 is, how greenhouses gasses work, what other gasses there are, and the history of the earth's climate, you will be less likely to believe nonsense or half-truths.

But then the world is also full of virtue-signallers who don't care if something is true or not. They simply regurgitate it thinking "What a good boy am I" for doing so. And they certainly do not comprehend that they are being someone's useful idiot.

Whether the KFF was a dry run for something bigger, I don't know. But what we know for sure is that government officials on all levels got a fresh taste for the possibilities of power that come from spreading hysteria. They did not miss that lesson.