A set of salient issues escape the comprehension of what appears to be a majority of the population. For example: climate change, green energy, the war in Ukraine, or migration. For issues like migration, they seem to suddenly get it once they’re inundated personally but no reaction is elicited based on pondered implications when they see it in the media happening someplace else.
Certain attributes that lead to credulity are obvious: ignorance, disinterest, stupidity, and a need to believe that things are going fine because, on an emotional level, the implications otherwise would be unbearable. Unfortunately, many white people will also calibrate their opinions based on what’s marketed to them as the view of the moral and sophisticated in contrast to the proles’ take on things. Reason or evidence plays no role in this orientation. I’ve written about this quite a bit.
Then, we have the logical fallacies to which many are susceptible. Principally, if “experts” are making a point, it must be true or if everyone believes something this is evidence of its validity, and the most tiresome, that exceptions disprove a rule. Often the exceptions are from a movie, such as a black woman being a brilliant non-diversity scientist.
The COVID vaccines are the most frightening demonstration thus far that some combination of the aforementioned deficiencies blind most of the population. This must have been figured out by nefarious entities long before we had to live through the proof of this concept or even prior to Edward Bernays setting up shop. How could a “mark of the beast” function if everyone said “no“, or even half the people refused?
Another issue is a sort of narcissistic confirmation bias. What I mean is that the lack of contradictions being presented to someone from an elite group, along with the perception that its members can tell the masses anything without consequences, seems to give their dishonesty and disingenuous intentions credibility inside their own psyche. Perhaps this is a purely Jewish phenomenon, but it would explain why the neocons, including their current mascot Antony Blinken, can move from debacle to debacle self-assured of themselves despite the escalatory nature of these debacles.
Setting all of this aside, there’s a phenomenon that doesn’t appear to get discussed. I’ll refer to it as an inability to perform realistic abstraction. To illustrate, many people, including my former comrades with advanced military educations, can’t consider in abstraction something for which they have no personal reference, despite the clarity of the math.
For instance, HIMARS was supposed to be this system that would stop the Russian military in its tracks. Well, the Russians have a variety of MLRS systems but 1,200 of the closest equivalents to HIMARs are on active duty and roughly 2,000 are in storage. What difference is a handful of HIMARs supposed to make? Conventional artillery shells comprise the vast majority of what’s been fired anyways. The fact that the scale of this conflict is something for which the GWOT furnishes no insights might explain why they put so much faith in the notion.
This applies to many aspects of the conflict, which features a line of contact that would stretch from DC down to the middle of Florida. The modern United States has never operated on this scale, is it a wonder they think small quantities of equipment can make a difference?
Iraq was basically contested along a corridor from Basra to Baghdad. How could anyone with this conflict as their frame of reference think like the Russian General Staff planning World War 3 in Ukraine with the experiences of World War 2 in Ukraine in mind? This differential alone would explain quite a bit.
You could scale that up to the ratio of the Earth to the Sun, a ball of superheated plasma so massive by comparison that the Earth orbits around it. Leaving the chemistry aside, which is going to have a decisive effect on the Earth’s temperature? The varying heat put off by the Sun or carbon? Nobody really has a frame of reference from their daily life about how big this planet even is, let alone the Sun. Once pondered, it boggles the mind.
Many people are comforted by the idea of wind turbines, devices they’ve been told are green saviors of an existential crisis. Provide them with the data on the annual output of a given nuclear plant and do the math on how many wind turbines (the term “windmills” gets used because this evokes pre-industrial agriculture) based on average output it would take to replace this plant. Visualizing all of these turbines in a row would be quite a stretch, or even where to find enough flat land to create the epic bird killing line. This, however, requires some intellectual curiosity and appreciation for scale.
I suppose this brings me to my final point for today: to successfully confront lies and nonsense, one must point it out, counter with the truth, and then explain why most people have accepted the contrary thus far. But, somebody would have to keep an open mind and be interested in the first place.
Even though the percentage of the population to which these two conditions apply is rather low, our potential audience is vast enough that producing content is a worthwhile endeavor. I suppose I’ll leave it on a good note today.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
Excellent! More Americans need to wake up to the fact that Barack Obama is and has always been, a socialist whose main goal is to destroy America. He is a true terrorist and needs to be prosecuted for his crime of high treason. He continues to serve a third term as president through the stupidity of Joe Biden. More needs to be published about un-American Obama, who isn’t an American citizen. “Radical-In-Chief” by Stanley Kurtz, “Barack Obama’s True Legacy” edited by Jamie Glazov, and “Red Handed” by Peter Schweizer are just a few of the books that define who Obama is.
Semper Fi!