One of the principles of life that’s really hit home with me over the past five years is that it’s the “good people” who are the most thoroughly lacking in mercy. The other is that these people are shocked when very bad things happen to them as a result of not being good at all. My attitude is one of grim determination that I’d sum up with the motto: It’s for you to experience, not for me to explain.
I’m not a cruel or vindictive man. There’re plenty of things that I’d rather explain so that people don’t have to experience. However, this dynamic has no relevance so one must calibrate the empathy that’s natural to feel towards friends and family members. It’s either that or succumb to insanity and despair because this country’s hard on people and you can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you, that’s vanity.
The Calvinist concept of predestination resonates with me because I’ve noticed that certain people have an orientation that’s incurable and seems to damn them right from the start. There doesn’t appear to be any way to reason with them by trying to point out the disparity between what they want and what they’ve accepted to feel good about themselves. Desiring to live in a pleasant community and supporting mass migration, for example. Needing to be respected as a person and endorsing the desecration of your forbearers would be another.
There’s a simple psychological playbook for these faux sophisticates: they’ll accept anything so long as it’s framed to them as what the clever and moral people think, and a strawman is set up for those who reject. In the case of COVID, an excellent strawman would be a young MAGA who dies hooked up to a ventilator for refusing the vaccine, presumably with his red hat on like the cartoon(s).
I was recently with some SWPL friends, one of whom had to be hospitalized for a week with an autoimmune disorder and was still reeling from its effects. Never once was the potential connection to vaccination brought up except that this forced her to wait for the booster. Her boyfriend was going on and on about how stupid someone would have to be to refuse vaccination and kept bringing up this ventilator thing. It seems to be their version of us receiving our final judgement.
These people are capable of any form of cruelty because they have a moral confidence in whatever it is they’ve been conned into believing. A recent poll by Rasmussen found 27% of all voters favor criminal punishments for vaccine critics, 59% of democratic voters would like to put us under home arrest and 29% support confiscating children from vax-refusers. Since I saw this on TV as a kid, I’ve always agreed with Rodney King on “Can’t we all just get along?”. However, no label other than “enemy” would describe someone who wants this stuff done to you.
We’re described by our detractors as extremists, but through my years of doing extremism I’ve met lots of articulate critical thinkers who’ve devoted countless hours to articulating reason with facts in an attempt to save people from themselves. That pretty much sums it all up.
It’s important to have this sense of self-actualization because one can accomplish great things this way. But, you’ll never convince a genius not to fly a plane into the side of a mountain. The best you can do is plead via radio from a safe location. I should’ve started prepping a long time ago.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
Example of stupidity: taking an experimental shot pushed by Fauci, Gates, Schwab, Trump, and Biden, to allegedly ‘protect’ against a virus, which, if I ever had it (never had one of the bogus ‘tests’), I would have a 99.8 per cent probability of survival. Now, as far as someone taking me to a FEMA quarantine camp or the Feds kidnapping my children because none of us got the death squirts, good luck with that, Democrat. A minimum of four people at my residence are capable of and willing to employ self-defense measures.
FYI to “Rebel Forever”, what you said would probably be considered fedposting at best, illegal at worst. I’d be wary of saying stuff like that on the Internet, where IP addresses, especially those of people who comment on places like ID, are doubtlessly ran over with a fine-tooth-comb by the feds– not that it matters much, we live in a surveillance state, the likes of which would make the Stasi green with envy, and should assume anything we’ve said in proximity to a smartphone is being transcribed into text and stored on a govt database, with the appropriate # of red flags next to our names being based on some algorithms. Still, I wouldn’t push my luck by saying certain things publicly in this climate.
Anyhow, I gotta be honest with the OP: I go to Orthodox church, and I’m not about to start criticizing the theology of people far more learned than me, but upon reading the 5-points (TULIP) of Calvinism, I can’t really find much to disagree with sans the “once saved, always saved” (IE “Perseverance Of The Saints”) doctrine. From even a naturalistic POV, most of them seem fairly self-evidently true, at least as a general rule of thumb, if you think of the implications and analogies to phenomenon we see in the natural world.
The author of this post is correct in noting that the masses of people are moved by thier perception of events (propaganda), not by the reality of the situation (which requires study and critical thinking skills). As a Calvinist, I would certainly agree “that certain people have an orientation that’s incurable and seems to damn them right from the start”.
I feel like I should know this, but what does “SWPL” stand for? It seems to be related to AWFL (Affluent White Female Liberal), but I was never able to find a definition.
Montoir,
SWPL is “Stuff White People Like”. here is a website:
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com