Part of the problem in this forum is I can never find a thread that I want to comment on directly.
Certainly, it's easy to just grab onto the congo line and respond to the shows that Alex works so hard to put up.
But, I don't think many of us got where we are in this forum and listening to Alex's podcast by not being a little Agin about something. (Thanks to my Scottish Grandma who used to report "Whatever they're for, he's agin")
That being said, I guess here is as good a place as any to share a little epiphany I've had.
Let me begin by saying, Skeptiko and Alex have absolutely been my co-pilot into the world of the Weird. I began my own podcast years ago "North of Reality" but making Audio Drama takes way too much energy for me to keep a podcast going that considers the nature of the universe. So, I stopped.
That being said, I keep discussing various elements with people and as much as I adore Alex, I think I need to start raising a warning flag.
And it is this. I don't think Alex is right about a couple of things.
I don't think he's right about Climate Change.
I don't think he's right about government-run healthcare.
And I don't think he's right about social democracies.
And I think the key for me is talking to my right-tipped friend who speaks in similar ways. And that's when I started comparing both my friend and Alex's rhetoric and I began to notice something.
First of all, there is most definitely the "Look into the Abyss too long, and the Abyss looks back" factor that goes on.
I think the problem is, if you go seeking the truth desperately, you start leaning on the old prejudices you may still have.
What prejudices would I be talking about?
I think Alex is absolutely right about Psy-Ops.
But I think he's wrong about how we go about it. I think the greatest Psy-Ops are those we enclose on ourselves.
In the fascinating book "People of the Lie" M. Scott Peck talks about how the lie is the things we tell ourselves that create the greatest Evil of all, the illusions that surround us.
Once we get to a point of hearing what we want to hear, it becomes a very dangerous place to break out of those places and see some of the variations beyond it.
Of what am I speaking? Well, the great Psy-Op that has been placed on America for many many decades now is that Capitalism GOOD, Socialism BAD. And it's become so ingrained that it has become almost a caricature. It's a Psy-Op designed to stop people from looking to their government to actually be effective, and turn to Corporatism and Big Business to solve problems.
Anand Giridharadas gets this with his latest book "Winners Take All". When he points out that the big Global push isn't some massive communist world-government plot to take over us all. They already have. It's called Disaster Capitalism. It's called Global Corporatism.
It's the billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeffrey Bezos who aren't some kind of blood-drinking pedo cult members (although to be fair I don't know what they do on their free time), but rather greed gone to measures that have exploded and now are out to not just fix the American economy but the world.
Not for any other reason but to make themselves more and more wealthy at the cost of the planet, of national independence, of your local Ma and Pa stores on the corner. There's a reason why the Olympic committee destroys most wildlife and economies of the communities that host them. There's a reason why a man in London was prevented from using "Olympic Pizza" as the name of his business he had decades before the Olympics arrived, and it's not because he was getting orders of children in his basement from Hilary Clinton.
It's because capitalism WITHOUT regulation goes off the rails and devours everything in sight.
Go watch the extremely well-researched "The Corporation" documentary and its most recent unfortunate sequel. Go read "The Shock Doctrine" from Naomi Klein or "One Market Under God" by the incredible Thomas Frank, journalist, and historian and realize that the problem isn't just CORRUPTION, as my friend says, but capitalism unregulated.
So let me first disavow my own beliefs. I'm not a communist. I'm not a socialist. I believe in capitalism. But not in the unregulated form of capitalism that's occurred. I believe in a strong PEOPLE LED government. In Canada, while we do have our own problems with corruption as we become more and more like the U.S., we have our own charter that says something entirely different than "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". We have "Peace, Order and Good Government". Before you start yelling that Mao would appreciate that, consider first that without those three I just mentioned, there is no effective Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." You have the disorder of the U.S. with hatred, petty squabblings and people picking jerseys and not moralities to follow.
So, my concern is the main problem is being entirely ignored and Hanlon's Razor is ignored.
STOP looking for some vast global conspiracy and look around you. Trying to get various powerful forces to agree on something is nearly impossible. As Jordan Peterson points out, we live on a knife's edge with civilization. It's almost impossible to get anything done because there are so many moving parts. I've been sitting here waiting for the Globalists to take over every country- as promised- because of COVID, or as Alex calls it "The Plandemic", and yet, what do we have? Joe Biden saying there won't be any such thing as vaccine passports from the government, and you should be not wearing the mask outside. Hell, once we get the pandemic under control we'll stop wearing the damn masks although there's plenty on the Left who want us to keep wearing them.
Where's the year-long Dark Forces that were going to take over everything?
I'll tell you where. They are the corporate capitalists sucking up jobs, and malls, and occupations. Planning to make employment obsolete, and profits for their shareholders higher and higher.
Where's Pizzagate? It's a smokescreen to let the Jeff Epstein's and Peter Nygard's of the world who have been enabled- not by some demonic power, but by unchecked obscene levels of wealth that put people in their control.
We already have study after study after study that demonstrates that massive wealth removes empathy. (
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threa...scientism-spirituality-why-evil-matters.4694/)
But we don't want to explore that, because it means challenging the very basis of the Psy-Op... that which is, making endless money is a universal good- EVEN THOUGH NO RELIGIOUS OR SPIRITUAL TRADITION SUPPORTS THAT.
I'm not saying we need to take a vow of poverty. I'm not even suggesting we should get rid of wealthy people.
But, we need to take the focus off of suggesting that there is some grand cabal and start looking at the main threats that are right before us.
And I will put my tent post in the ground here.
It is NOT ethical for someone to be a billionaire. Let's say you can have... 300 million personal wealth and tax 90% off the next dollar from that. When that happened in America before, the middle class flourished... and what's MORE, you didn't have nearly the corruption you have now.
America could possibly be one of the most corrupt First World nations, and it's because their form of capitalism is broken. Their ethical understanding of wealth is creating global insecurity and endangering the entire planet.
If Bill Gates had 300 million dollars net worth. He wouldn't be the power broker in denying patent requests for vaccines. Jeff Bezos wouldn't be wanting to buy up banking institutions and closed-down malls. And the leaders of the free world wouldn't be bought and sold.
A new social democracy model MUST come forward in which capitalism is still the function of commerce, and government is the effective bulwark for the people against the tyranny of the Global Corporations.
There's a reason why Iceland jailed the banksters who crashed the economy in 2008. Because their people demanded it.
And guess what? They are still running a market economy there. Imagine.
J