Weak rulers make hard rules the people must follow. Authoritarianism.
Strong leaders ask the people to follow his lead. Democracies.
The former demand obedience using threats, the people do not trust them and must be forced to obey; they know instinctively the rules are in the ruler’s best interests, not the people’s.
The latter is trusted by the people he leads and follow him willingly; they know instinctively the leader’s ask is in the best interest of all.
Which is why authoritarian governments are inherently weak. They are led by weak people. Who know they are weak. Who resort to brute force to impose their will on the people they govern.
Free people must be governed by strong leaders. Courageous leaders. Who earn the trust of the people they govern with demonstrations of courage. It's an instinctual phenomenon which can’t be faked.
Free people who become subjects to authoritarian regimes suffer from weak leadership. That overcompensates with bullying tactics and shows of force. Related to "Napoleon complex," those with short stature who become tyrants applies to all of the weak pretenders who ascend to a throne. Authoritarian regimes, like the CCP, are the governing models that provide refuge and privilege for the weak who seek to rule others. A system that allows cowards to tower over men of real strength and courage. Cowards who live in delusions of their own strength, fantasies. There's a reason that Hollywood and authoritarian politicians go together, both actors and politicians are only powerful in fictional imaginings of self.
Authoritarians are weak. Never forget it. They don’t. Those asserting authoritarianism is courageous leadership invert reality of the natural world. Because they are weak. Because they are cowards. Because they lack courage and strength. And must try to convince those they seek to dominate that their inverted reality, their fiction is true. Which is why they ultimately fail.
Authoritarian power is based in lies that cannot withstand the natural laws of the natural world. Which is why they often meet the coward's fate: Mussolini, Ceaușescu, Saddam, Gaddafi. All cowards.
The CCP is actually ruled by cowards, weak men who lack courage. Needing entire armies, secret police, propagandists and censors to hold onto power. But their ultimate fate is certain. The only uncertainty is how much death and destruction they end up being responsible for in their attempts at intimidation before they meet their tyrannical end. It's the natural order of things. God's law beats man's law. Always. The strong win. Not the weak.
Related, this story is of the popular meme that circulated on social media beginning in 2015. This is an example of psychological "priming." This meme convinced a great many that nature is more virtuous than man in elevating the weakest to lead the entire pack. It was so successful and preyed on the target's sense of idealistic compassion for the less fortunate that even when the message in the meme was debunked the target of this psychological priming defended the meme as something that *should* be the natural order of things. That *should* be natural law. And be made man's law because it conveyed the height of altruism, putting others above self.
But the natural world doesn't obey fictions that defy reality. No matter how much the idealist wants and demands it to. Psychological priming that has been ongoing in society for much longer than 2020. Which enables the demands of society that we all must change to indulge the delusions of the weak among us.
Like the mentally ill, those suffering with gender dysphoria, society now facing demands we use preferred pronouns under penalty of law or social exclusion. And those suffering from germophobia, demands we mask up, quarantine and lockdown, lose businesses and livelihoods, sacrifice child development to protect the few actually at risk because of a mass delusion, induced or intrinsic. Or those demanding we go without heat and food to protect war refugees suffering from military operations on borders in faraway lands; to prevent catastrophic climate changed based on fictional computer models, to save polar bears from extinction.
This meme, an example of psychological priming. Programs a mindset that embraces fictional understanding of reality and the natural world. Priming that reimagines man's ideals as real world experience. Intentional manipulation of the public mind to view weak leaders as courageous and strong. Propaganda that only weak leaders benefit from. That ultimately crashes into reality when it meets the natural world. As God created it.
As a biologist, I remember being super annoyed by that circulating meme!
I'm a total leftist, and old school communist, but of the idealist kind, not the Soviet or N.Korea or China or Cambodia kind... I realise that seems contradictory, I do think Cuba came close to a proper communism, but failure again, they only remained small and functional due to support from Russia and isolation from the West. So yes, I recognise there are problems. I remain somewhat utopian.
However, I also get amused at Americans claiming Canadians are socialists! Not in the least! The NDP abandoned socialism under Thomas Mulcair the last decade, and the Liberals are just capitalists with a pretty smile and younger years. Plus, Canadian Liberals have become truly illiberal, so it's a mess.
No, Canada does not have "socialised healthcare", Canadians have public access to a PRIVATE healthcare system, as system of private profits, and private-driven policies.
As for an example of "socialised", well that would be Québec's Electrical company. That is fully publicly owned and run, or Québec's automobile insurance, which is completely public, and runs on a no-fault system, which GREATLY reduces admin costs and actually reduces the overall costs associated with car insurance.
Where I am getting with this?
I think Canadian styled healthcare is a complete failure at the PEOPLE end. Yes, Canada has less days of absenteeism at work than Americans. Our healthscare system accomplishes that. BUT Canadians are not healthier than Americans.
Also, Canada's healthcare system is crumbling because the private controls policy. And where are the biggest profits in medical care? In chasing eternal life. The vast majority of Canada's healthcare system costs are engulfed in forcing people to live past menopause, and forcing babies that should have never been born to be subjected to a life of medical servitude, plus the eternal medical servitude of organ transplants, and chronic illness care.
Public healthcare was not invented for chronic care, it was designed for acute care, quick repairs.
But here we are, stuck in a system obsessed with life at ANY and ALL LIMITLESS costs.
It's a horrible direction for society.
But Leftists are dead. All leftists are now corporate shills with zero big picture analysis.
Thanks for your reply, Tracy. I have to say I'm a bit confused, though. The meme that you were super annoyed at, as a biologist, conveys what I understand an idealistic, old-school communist to believe the community of man should aspire to. Knowing that man is as much a product and prisoner of nature as wolves under Darwinian survival of the fittest belief structures. I seek to understand what I see as a dichotomy.
As to the abandonment of socialism and end of leftism, well, the same can be said about the abandonment of free markets and principled conservatism on the right. Both sides of that ideological divide have been abandoned by the governing class. We are beginning to see more clearly the real divide in the world around us now that the usefulness of the old left-right, liberal-conservative, fascist-communist divides fall away. Artificial constructs of division. Employed by a governing elite class the new nobility, to keep the masses divided so they are more easily conquered, ruled by a small minority in a model they call, "good stewardship." Very much like how monarchs like King George III viewed his governance of the the colonies. The masses provided for and protected by their benevolent, enlightened, compassionate rule. That sometimes needs a firm hand to protect order, for collective good.
I suggest to you that we all have been lied to about everything we thought about the world we live in, the systems we live with, and who really runs things. Hard to pin down what its called. But it isn't the terms we were taught. It shares a lot of traits of an oligarchy. And public-private government-corporate fascism. And dynastic criminal racketeering.
They still use words like democracy, socialism, constitutionalism, marxism, capitalism, etc, but they don't really mean them. Just useful as hopium for the masses to imbibe. "If my team wins they'll be governed by my 'ism" Which of course they never do. They divide us, put us on teams, then use a chosen team's captain to keep us in line. Divide. Conquer.
Like Mark found out early in the pandemic, a libertarian and communist who think freely have more in common than a libertarian and communist who march in lockstep with their respective ideologues following their leaders. Because the true divide in our society isn't ideological, it's class and status.
As Noam Chomsky wrote in Manufacturing Consent:
"So you can be either a Marxist-Leninist commissar, or you can be somebody celebrating the magnificence of State capitalism, and you can serve those guys. It’s more or less the same position. You pick one or the other depending on your estimate of where power is, and that can change."
Héhé, I warned you you'd find it contradictory. But I think the contradiction lies in the modern constituents and verbiage, as opposed to how humanity actually evolved. So I pretty much agree with your entire comment. As Mark noted in the early days that it's the communists that initially stood, and to Chomsky, who veered 180 from his earlier libertarian-socialist youth, to his more recent authoritarian-"liberal" À la Canada.
The "Left" abandoned protesting the Davos Set in 2016, and now it's the "right" taking up the fight of workers versus billionaires?! The world is upside down, our words contradict our reality.
My only "loyalty" is to biology, and I HATE when people misrepresent biology. Biology is not kind or evil, biology does not "care" about the weak. My communism is not about protecting the weak, but about procuring some degree of evenness in the everyday life as a "citizen".
Your comment, "biology is not kind or evil, biology does not "care" about the weak" brings to mind another quote Chomsky makes in Manufacturing Consent. He references Harold Lasswell's 1933 entry in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences saying,
"Propaganda, he says, we shouldn’t have a negative connotation about, it’s neutral. Propaganda, he says, is as neutral as a pump handle. You can use it for good, you can use it for bad; since we're good people, obviously, — that’s sort of true by definition — we’ll use it for good purposes, and there should be no negative connotations about that. In fact, it’s moral to use it, because that’s the only way that you can save the ignorant and stupid masses of the population from their own errors. You don’t let a three year old run across the street, and you don’t let ordinary people make their own decisions. You have to control them."
Which, when comparing that excerpt to your assessment of biology, might lead one to believe that the elite ruling class who've been using mind fuckery priming propaganda like the meme on the masses are simply acting as biologists. They are not kind or evil. They simply don't care about the masses below them any more than they need them for utilitarian purposes.
Allowing them to give Pulitzer prizes to neutral propagandists who describe the plight of millions starving to death during Stalin's collectivization famine as "breaking eggs to make an omelet."
That is all true. I have zero love for Stalin. But as a hardcore atheist, I don't believe in "good or evil". I believe billionaires aim to be richer, and us lumpen lump along. I fight back as much as I can, but without a title, without a book, without money, my words are meaningless, just the beta monkey in the tribe. I've been terribly disappointed by Chomsky, like the death of a favourite childhood pet.
Propaganda=grooming="education"
Homo sapiens has the longest infancy of any species (not compared to medical longevity, but compared to natural longevity), the longest grooming/educational/propaganda period. Propaganda is a strange word, and does wield different meanings. Technically, we would be breeding at 15 and dying at 45-55, and only the very few genetically favoured (or lucky) individuals would live past that. It's why the elderly used to be venerated, because they were few, law of supply and demand ;)
Today, half the population is elderly, no wonder we are in an ageist society. And the elderly now cling to life if it were a right, just the like the religious cling to the "right" to birth.
The ruling elites aren't "evil" per se, they just have different objectives.
In my book, THE biggest propaganda ever are God-Heaven-Hell-Devil. However, Gnu-Atheists replaced that propaganda with the "right to live forever" propaganda. The Gnu-atheists aspire to earthly eternity, the faithful aspire to celestial eternity. Same bs to me.
An honest biologist knows we just die.
I never use "oh those poor who were starved" in my arguments because all elites are equal in that regard.
I fear we are getting lost in side roads. You're much more erudite than this miserable palaeobiologist ;)
I do dream. A communism without authoritarianism.
The reality is it's rather how humanity functioned before "capital" (in the pure currency sense), before agriculture.
My concern is the more inequality we condone in society, the more grievance we nurture, and the more instability is created. Whereas a more egalitarian (not perfectly egalitarian, nuance), the more content humans are.
In an art class long ago, I was assigned with depicting peace. I drew a man in an animal skin, resting his elbow on his club, in front of a cave entrance. 40 years later, I haven't lost that vision. Biology and nature must come first. Fuck cities and civilisation. The forms of Marxism that relied on industrial production and urban living were NEVER going to bring happiness. There can be no industrial-urban collectivism, it is anti-biological, biophobic.
This conversation would have been much more entertaining in a bar with a few drinks! :D
Weak rulers make hard rules the people must follow. Authoritarianism.
Strong leaders ask the people to follow his lead. Democracies.
The former demand obedience using threats, the people do not trust them and must be forced to obey; they know instinctively the rules are in the ruler’s best interests, not the people’s.
The latter is trusted by the people he leads and follow him willingly; they know instinctively the leader’s ask is in the best interest of all.
Which is why authoritarian governments are inherently weak. They are led by weak people. Who know they are weak. Who resort to brute force to impose their will on the people they govern.
Free people must be governed by strong leaders. Courageous leaders. Who earn the trust of the people they govern with demonstrations of courage. It's an instinctual phenomenon which can’t be faked.
Free people who become subjects to authoritarian regimes suffer from weak leadership. That overcompensates with bullying tactics and shows of force. Related to "Napoleon complex," those with short stature who become tyrants applies to all of the weak pretenders who ascend to a throne. Authoritarian regimes, like the CCP, are the governing models that provide refuge and privilege for the weak who seek to rule others. A system that allows cowards to tower over men of real strength and courage. Cowards who live in delusions of their own strength, fantasies. There's a reason that Hollywood and authoritarian politicians go together, both actors and politicians are only powerful in fictional imaginings of self.
Authoritarians are weak. Never forget it. They don’t. Those asserting authoritarianism is courageous leadership invert reality of the natural world. Because they are weak. Because they are cowards. Because they lack courage and strength. And must try to convince those they seek to dominate that their inverted reality, their fiction is true. Which is why they ultimately fail.
Authoritarian power is based in lies that cannot withstand the natural laws of the natural world. Which is why they often meet the coward's fate: Mussolini, Ceaușescu, Saddam, Gaddafi. All cowards.
The CCP is actually ruled by cowards, weak men who lack courage. Needing entire armies, secret police, propagandists and censors to hold onto power. But their ultimate fate is certain. The only uncertainty is how much death and destruction they end up being responsible for in their attempts at intimidation before they meet their tyrannical end. It's the natural order of things. God's law beats man's law. Always. The strong win. Not the weak.
Related, this story is of the popular meme that circulated on social media beginning in 2015. This is an example of psychological "priming." This meme convinced a great many that nature is more virtuous than man in elevating the weakest to lead the entire pack. It was so successful and preyed on the target's sense of idealistic compassion for the less fortunate that even when the message in the meme was debunked the target of this psychological priming defended the meme as something that *should* be the natural order of things. That *should* be natural law. And be made man's law because it conveyed the height of altruism, putting others above self.
But the natural world doesn't obey fictions that defy reality. No matter how much the idealist wants and demands it to. Psychological priming that has been ongoing in society for much longer than 2020. Which enables the demands of society that we all must change to indulge the delusions of the weak among us.
Like the mentally ill, those suffering with gender dysphoria, society now facing demands we use preferred pronouns under penalty of law or social exclusion. And those suffering from germophobia, demands we mask up, quarantine and lockdown, lose businesses and livelihoods, sacrifice child development to protect the few actually at risk because of a mass delusion, induced or intrinsic. Or those demanding we go without heat and food to protect war refugees suffering from military operations on borders in faraway lands; to prevent catastrophic climate changed based on fictional computer models, to save polar bears from extinction.
This meme, an example of psychological priming. Programs a mindset that embraces fictional understanding of reality and the natural world. Priming that reimagines man's ideals as real world experience. Intentional manipulation of the public mind to view weak leaders as courageous and strong. Propaganda that only weak leaders benefit from. That ultimately crashes into reality when it meets the natural world. As God created it.
https://factcheck.afp.com/sick-wolves-dont-lead-pack-and-leader-isnt-last-line
As a biologist, I remember being super annoyed by that circulating meme!
I'm a total leftist, and old school communist, but of the idealist kind, not the Soviet or N.Korea or China or Cambodia kind... I realise that seems contradictory, I do think Cuba came close to a proper communism, but failure again, they only remained small and functional due to support from Russia and isolation from the West. So yes, I recognise there are problems. I remain somewhat utopian.
However, I also get amused at Americans claiming Canadians are socialists! Not in the least! The NDP abandoned socialism under Thomas Mulcair the last decade, and the Liberals are just capitalists with a pretty smile and younger years. Plus, Canadian Liberals have become truly illiberal, so it's a mess.
No, Canada does not have "socialised healthcare", Canadians have public access to a PRIVATE healthcare system, as system of private profits, and private-driven policies.
As for an example of "socialised", well that would be Québec's Electrical company. That is fully publicly owned and run, or Québec's automobile insurance, which is completely public, and runs on a no-fault system, which GREATLY reduces admin costs and actually reduces the overall costs associated with car insurance.
Where I am getting with this?
I think Canadian styled healthcare is a complete failure at the PEOPLE end. Yes, Canada has less days of absenteeism at work than Americans. Our healthscare system accomplishes that. BUT Canadians are not healthier than Americans.
Also, Canada's healthcare system is crumbling because the private controls policy. And where are the biggest profits in medical care? In chasing eternal life. The vast majority of Canada's healthcare system costs are engulfed in forcing people to live past menopause, and forcing babies that should have never been born to be subjected to a life of medical servitude, plus the eternal medical servitude of organ transplants, and chronic illness care.
Public healthcare was not invented for chronic care, it was designed for acute care, quick repairs.
But here we are, stuck in a system obsessed with life at ANY and ALL LIMITLESS costs.
It's a horrible direction for society.
But Leftists are dead. All leftists are now corporate shills with zero big picture analysis.
Thanks for your reply, Tracy. I have to say I'm a bit confused, though. The meme that you were super annoyed at, as a biologist, conveys what I understand an idealistic, old-school communist to believe the community of man should aspire to. Knowing that man is as much a product and prisoner of nature as wolves under Darwinian survival of the fittest belief structures. I seek to understand what I see as a dichotomy.
As to the abandonment of socialism and end of leftism, well, the same can be said about the abandonment of free markets and principled conservatism on the right. Both sides of that ideological divide have been abandoned by the governing class. We are beginning to see more clearly the real divide in the world around us now that the usefulness of the old left-right, liberal-conservative, fascist-communist divides fall away. Artificial constructs of division. Employed by a governing elite class the new nobility, to keep the masses divided so they are more easily conquered, ruled by a small minority in a model they call, "good stewardship." Very much like how monarchs like King George III viewed his governance of the the colonies. The masses provided for and protected by their benevolent, enlightened, compassionate rule. That sometimes needs a firm hand to protect order, for collective good.
I suggest to you that we all have been lied to about everything we thought about the world we live in, the systems we live with, and who really runs things. Hard to pin down what its called. But it isn't the terms we were taught. It shares a lot of traits of an oligarchy. And public-private government-corporate fascism. And dynastic criminal racketeering.
They still use words like democracy, socialism, constitutionalism, marxism, capitalism, etc, but they don't really mean them. Just useful as hopium for the masses to imbibe. "If my team wins they'll be governed by my 'ism" Which of course they never do. They divide us, put us on teams, then use a chosen team's captain to keep us in line. Divide. Conquer.
Like Mark found out early in the pandemic, a libertarian and communist who think freely have more in common than a libertarian and communist who march in lockstep with their respective ideologues following their leaders. Because the true divide in our society isn't ideological, it's class and status.
As Noam Chomsky wrote in Manufacturing Consent:
"So you can be either a Marxist-Leninist commissar, or you can be somebody celebrating the magnificence of State capitalism, and you can serve those guys. It’s more or less the same position. You pick one or the other depending on your estimate of where power is, and that can change."
https://chomsky.info/19890315/
Their loyalty is to their privilege, not any particular ideology. Ideologies are for the ignorant masses who need to be controlled.
Héhé, I warned you you'd find it contradictory. But I think the contradiction lies in the modern constituents and verbiage, as opposed to how humanity actually evolved. So I pretty much agree with your entire comment. As Mark noted in the early days that it's the communists that initially stood, and to Chomsky, who veered 180 from his earlier libertarian-socialist youth, to his more recent authoritarian-"liberal" À la Canada.
The "Left" abandoned protesting the Davos Set in 2016, and now it's the "right" taking up the fight of workers versus billionaires?! The world is upside down, our words contradict our reality.
My only "loyalty" is to biology, and I HATE when people misrepresent biology. Biology is not kind or evil, biology does not "care" about the weak. My communism is not about protecting the weak, but about procuring some degree of evenness in the everyday life as a "citizen".
Your comment, "biology is not kind or evil, biology does not "care" about the weak" brings to mind another quote Chomsky makes in Manufacturing Consent. He references Harold Lasswell's 1933 entry in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences saying,
"Propaganda, he says, we shouldn’t have a negative connotation about, it’s neutral. Propaganda, he says, is as neutral as a pump handle. You can use it for good, you can use it for bad; since we're good people, obviously, — that’s sort of true by definition — we’ll use it for good purposes, and there should be no negative connotations about that. In fact, it’s moral to use it, because that’s the only way that you can save the ignorant and stupid masses of the population from their own errors. You don’t let a three year old run across the street, and you don’t let ordinary people make their own decisions. You have to control them."
Which, when comparing that excerpt to your assessment of biology, might lead one to believe that the elite ruling class who've been using mind fuckery priming propaganda like the meme on the masses are simply acting as biologists. They are not kind or evil. They simply don't care about the masses below them any more than they need them for utilitarian purposes.
Allowing them to give Pulitzer prizes to neutral propagandists who describe the plight of millions starving to death during Stalin's collectivization famine as "breaking eggs to make an omelet."
https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/
That is all true. I have zero love for Stalin. But as a hardcore atheist, I don't believe in "good or evil". I believe billionaires aim to be richer, and us lumpen lump along. I fight back as much as I can, but without a title, without a book, without money, my words are meaningless, just the beta monkey in the tribe. I've been terribly disappointed by Chomsky, like the death of a favourite childhood pet.
Propaganda=grooming="education"
Homo sapiens has the longest infancy of any species (not compared to medical longevity, but compared to natural longevity), the longest grooming/educational/propaganda period. Propaganda is a strange word, and does wield different meanings. Technically, we would be breeding at 15 and dying at 45-55, and only the very few genetically favoured (or lucky) individuals would live past that. It's why the elderly used to be venerated, because they were few, law of supply and demand ;)
Today, half the population is elderly, no wonder we are in an ageist society. And the elderly now cling to life if it were a right, just the like the religious cling to the "right" to birth.
The ruling elites aren't "evil" per se, they just have different objectives.
In my book, THE biggest propaganda ever are God-Heaven-Hell-Devil. However, Gnu-Atheists replaced that propaganda with the "right to live forever" propaganda. The Gnu-atheists aspire to earthly eternity, the faithful aspire to celestial eternity. Same bs to me.
An honest biologist knows we just die.
I never use "oh those poor who were starved" in my arguments because all elites are equal in that regard.
I fear we are getting lost in side roads. You're much more erudite than this miserable palaeobiologist ;)
I do dream. A communism without authoritarianism.
The reality is it's rather how humanity functioned before "capital" (in the pure currency sense), before agriculture.
My concern is the more inequality we condone in society, the more grievance we nurture, and the more instability is created. Whereas a more egalitarian (not perfectly egalitarian, nuance), the more content humans are.
In an art class long ago, I was assigned with depicting peace. I drew a man in an animal skin, resting his elbow on his club, in front of a cave entrance. 40 years later, I haven't lost that vision. Biology and nature must come first. Fuck cities and civilisation. The forms of Marxism that relied on industrial production and urban living were NEVER going to bring happiness. There can be no industrial-urban collectivism, it is anti-biological, biophobic.
This conversation would have been much more entertaining in a bar with a few drinks! :D